Taking the Right Kind of Breaks
Sometimes, the best thing you can do when studying, is walk away from it. I mean, possibly not when you’re thirteen minutes away from a deadline or something, that would potentially be foolish, but when you are at a certain point, if you are working to schedule, one of the things I have found is that breaks should be part of the scheduled activity.
If you are an avid reader or gamer, you have probably, at some point, had in your hands a book or game that you have loved so passionately that you have been unable to put it down. It has probably resonated with you so strongly, that you have finished it, and it has instantly left you with an indefinable sense of loss, and you have drifted around for a while, and then become angry at yourself, or at the book/game, and eventually, inevitably, you have reached the realisation that you are going to have to read/play again. I will say that I did this less and less as I got older, because it absolutely does not work. A second read (or play through) straight from a first is absolutely anticlimactic, and can in fact turn me away from the book altogether. The important factor being its freshness.
Then move to a piece of work that you have been hammering at for days, or weeks, or even months. You have read paragraphs of that work repeatedly while rewording them, adding to them, inserting quotations into them, and properly referencing them. Whether you realise it or not, by this point, you pretty much know them by heart, although you cannot necessarily read them out without the page in front of you. Eventually, you reach the stage where that work is complete aside from a proofread. At this point, my findings are that you cannot effectively proofread that work, because you cannot read it. You think you’re reading it, but your brain reads what it thinks the page says, not what is actually there, and completely misses the errors. Years ago, during the first year of my degree course, I was given one of my best ever tips for writing. It was to complete an assignment at least a week before the deadline, put it away somewhere, and forget about it for at least three days. I have actually found a week to be more effective. A holiday is perfect, to be completely honest. We can only remember so much information, and with a distraction right in front of us, we forget what those pages say if we have some time not to look at them. When we pick them back up, the big glaring holes are far easier to pick out, because it is as good as someone else’s work.
I last applied this thought process to my PG Cert assignment, by now we’ve reached around 2020. I was expecting to see the holes, and this was all fine, but I also had a lot of word count to cut down. While this is not that unexpected for me (I can go either way, too much or too little), I had forgotten how cathartic it can be to carve away the dross that quite simply does not need to be in the write up. Over 1,500 words went in this draft, which was a third of the content, and I thoroughly enjoyed deleting all of it. It felt incredibly repetitive and full of filler. I did begin to struggle more towards the end of the exercise, but I am going to choose to see that as a good thing.
