“10 Best Study Tips.” How often do we see titles like that? Headings designed to convince us that the author has the ultimate knowledge on how to do this or that, as if we the readers are missing some of life’s best wisdom. They are designed to convince us that if we aren’t following this advice we are failing to achieve the best that we can be.
You can see it many places: “5 Foods Never to Eat” or “Best Car Brands.” We have whole blogs devoted to advice like this. Pinterest is liberally flavored with them, some magazines earn their bread and butter through them, and clickbait articles seem to be solely populated by them. One would think that we would grow sick of these statements, but they still seem to be as popular as ever.
No wonder, too. They can offer good advice sometimes, if one is a responsible reader and doesn’t take every word for gospel truth. For example, I could read the food article and discover an unhealthy aspect of a food that I was unaware of before. Having double checked the authenticity of the source and discovering that it’s accurate, I could then make a decision about how much I would continue to eat that food in the future.
Unfortunately, some people take the mindset that the advice is laying down some sort of unofficial law. “This article says that’s bad for you,” they say. “You shouldn’t eat that.” Maybe they’re right; perhaps they’re not. The thing about that advice is that it tends to assume everyone has the same experiences and backgrounds.
I’ll use the studying tips as an example. Say that I read this article and step two is to always take notes in class. This is excellent advice, but not something that works so well for me. I’m a slow writer, so I can never keep up with the professor’s lecture. Even typing doesn’t go so well for me. I take a few notes, but for the most part, I just sit and listen. This way I don’t miss something. Therefore, if I took this advice to heart, I would end up just missing more of the lecture scrambling to write down something said five minutes ago. If I were to put this piece of advice on my own personal list of top studying tips, it would be very near the bottom.
Another way that the article in my example fails to help is that many people don’t seem to consider that there are different learning strengths. For example, a person who learns visually won’t do so well with a study tip that says to listen to supplementary instruction. This isn’t to say that it won’t help them at all, but they’d probably spend their time better by reading over their notes or working out practice problems. Or, if someone learns best in an auditory fashion, advice telling them to write out their notes for better retention probably isn’t as helpful as it was to the person giving the advice.
The point is that, though it’s good to share life experiences and knowledge, what is best for us may not be best for others. Conversely, what works best for others may not help us much at all. We must look closely at what brings the speaker to make such statements, but mostly we must examine ourselves and know what makes us tick. If I were told that all grains were among the hypothetical “never eat” list, my response would be very simple: “Forget that. I want bread.”
