Studying. I hated it. I’m a visual thinker and a slow reader. Taking pleasure from reading means being able to visualize the words. For fiction, I imagine how the action would look on a silver screen. For non-fiction, I connect the concepts into a visual narrative. The reading comprehension portions of standardized tests were hell for me because the writing was both boring and almost designed to confuse. The words wouldn’t stick in my brain to form a picture I could see in my mind’s eye because I was so anxious about the time limit. So my math and spatial relations abilities had to do double duty, lifting my test scores in those areas, proving that my reading scores didn’t make me “slow”.

The studying techniques outlined in the linked WSJ.com article below (focus, review, repeat, sleep, eat well) seem like great practices that would have helped me back in high school and college. My parents helped with encouragement–they even enrolled me in an SAT prep class–but they never helped me actually solve my problem with reading. Maybe they never wanted to acknowledge I had a problem…

Read the article normally:
Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study?

Or free of distractions via Readability:
Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study? (Readability)