Table of Contents

waterlilysage @ Flickr

If you go ahead and write a revision bible either by yourself (good luck) or collectively (better idea), a handy thing to have is a table of contents so that you can quickly find information. Making one manually is like stapling your post-it notes to your legs: pointless and painful. Microsoft word can make you one in a breeze. Here's how:

1. Write your revision notes making sure to head everything with a good numbering structure. I would avoid using the autonumber function in Word just give each heading a place within your number structure and type it manually. For example,

1.Neuropsychiatry
1.1 Somatic Hallucinations
1.1.1 Areas within a topic (e.g. Phantom Limb Syndrome)
1.1.1.1 Highly specific areas (e.g. Background, Causes, Treatment etc)

2. Once you have written your notes, click INSERT>TOOLBARS>OUTLINING. You should get a new toolbar.

3. Highlight a particular heading and in the drop-down box select which level is needed according to the numbering structure. For example:

LEVEL 1: The Module (e.g. Neuropsychiatry)
LEVEL 2: The Topic (e.g. Somatic Hallucinations)
LEVEL 3: Areas within a topic (e.g. Phantom Limb Syndrome)
LEVEL 4: Highly specific areas (e.g. Background, Causes, Treatment etc)

4. Locate the place in your document where you want to put the table of contents and then click INSERT>REFERENCE>INDEX AND TABLES

5. In the window that appears click on the TABLE OF CONTENTS tab. This should be the second in from the left. Tweak anything you feel like or leave it alone and just press OK.

6. Bingo. You're done.

(If you make any changes to the document and want to update the table of contents click UPDATE TOC in the Outline Toolbar you added).

Here is a document for you to have a play with. This is what it should look like after adding the TOC. For those interested in seeing what a monster TOC looks, this is the one from my revision bible. Just in case it totally overwhelms you, I want to quickly add that it represents the work of three people over a month and a bit.

The Timetable

(offshore @ Flickr)

Revision in its literal translation is inaccurate for the first part of the task that lies ahead. This is because revision means re-visiting the stuff you have already looked at. Much of the stuff you will be looking at will be for the first time because you were absent/dozing/comatose during that lecture or you simply need to flesh out the skeleton it provided.

Thus, the first stage of your revision is research. This should not just be the blind copying out of material. It should be active, involving lots of thinking about the material at hand. I think I'll do a post on note taking soon.

In the meantime, you'll need to get yourself sorted with a good timetable. This is absolutely vital. It should block off time for researching, then thinking, then learning. For example, you might say that by the end of the first week of the summer term you will have all the research completed. This then leaves you lots of time to organise your thoughts, write essay plans and start learning the material. That's what I did.

I had a look around for my old timetables but it wasn't to be: I must have binned them after exams. Instead, here are my Tables of Contents from Level 2 and Level 3. (I'll show you how to make a Table of Contents in the next few days). It might help you organise your time more effectively. Each subsection (e.g. L3: Psychosis –Auditory and Visual Hallucinations; L2: Philosophy of Science) probably took anything from half a day to two days to complete. Remember, before you freak out, this was a combined effort.

Make sure you leave some padding for overflow and that you give yourself plenty of time to relax and do other stuff. Pencil in your exam dates too, if they have been published yet. This will help you get a sense of how to allocate your time later on. It should also show you how there isn't a luxurious amount of time ahead that visions of May/June conjure up ('oh, it's in the summer - that's way off' kind of attitude).

For those of you who like to do it the digital way, Google Calendar works a treat and is out there in the 'cloud', so you can access it wherever you are and there's internet. Handy if you're roaming about.

Mind maps: Bubbl.us

The Beautiful Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman

I just came across this nifty webpage called Bubbl.us. Might be useful to those of you whole like making mind maps in your revision.

Hunt as a pack

There is a scene in the BBC's great Planet Earth that captures a rare wild dog hunt. Have a look at it here. The narrator tells us that the secret to the dogs' efficiency is "their...teamwork and tactics". There is truth in this for revision as well.

In previous posts, I have tried to dissuade you from scrimping time in order to cover the material and said that cherry picking is a useful strategy if done cleverly. This post is about the most useful revision strategy of them all: copy the dogs and work together.

There is the most enormous resistance to this idea of collaboration with undergrads. It's because students dont trust each other well enough to coordinate an outcome that's better for everyone. It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. There is nothing irrational about wanting to go at it alone; the logic is fine. It's just there is a better logic for working together: you get better outcomes and less hassle along the way. Isn't this what any student would want?

What to do?

Form groups of up to around four or five people. Three is perfect in my opinion. Any more and the trust on which the whole operation rests is destroyed.

Then split the workload up between you. That means each of you taking a topic. I strongly advise that you share out a module evenly instead of one person doing the whole of one module and someone else doing the whole of another. That way you get a flavour for each one.

Once you have your crack team assembled, everyone needs to get on and produce very detailed notes on an area extracting the key arguments and references and trying to fit it into a bigger picture.

It is absolutely essential to make these easy enough for others to understand. You shouldn't just copy and paste bits from papers because the stream of logic will be split up. If you take care to build your notes with solid logical links and proper explanation you will remember them better, your revisions buddies will too and this clarity of thought will be evident in your exam essays. So, everyone wins.

For example, in Neuropsychiatry one of your group may take on "Psychosis– Delusions". Here they will need to zoom in and articulate what this is, what the sub-conditions are (Jealousy and Persecutory Delusions, Autoscopic Phenomena and Delusional Misidentification Syndrome), their organic basis (spatial and chemical) and then zoom out and see how this could be slotted into a general essay like "Do patients complaining of psychotic delusions have a real disease?". This example is primarily for 3rd years but it is useful for 2nd years to think in this holistic way as well.

With this strategy - working as a team and tactically splitting the workload - whole swathes of the course will be covered and you can quite quickly arrive at something very exciting indeed: a book (or revision bible as I shall call it from now on). This companion can then form the basis of your revision, thinking and learning (you can even put it on your iPod)

As a guide, the 'revision bible' I produced with my two accomplices in third year (they both got Firsts) is some 300 pages long and 175,000 words. Each module averaged out at roughly 22,000 words.

In second year, I did something similar (by myself, which was horrible, hence why I recruited others in third year). It was 98,000 words long, averaging out at roughly 10,000 words per module.

It's geeky, I know, but that's kind of the point of the degree. It's time to wake up your inner geek now, not languish in a culture against excellence.

We had it all done and printed (here) by week one of the summer term, having started before the beginning of the Easter holidays. We worked six days a week for six weeks and a very manageable nine hours a day (3 in the morning, 3 after lunch, 3 in the evening). Plenty of other time for enjoying life.

So in total: 9 hours x 36 days = 324 hours per person; 324 hours x 3 people = 972 hours. Note how the individual number of hours is way less than the estimate I quoted a few posts back and how the total number of hours is similar to this estimate (it's a bit more actually, but that means its better because there is more detail packed in).

Once you have got to this stage you'll feel great. You have researched a third (or whatever fraction depending on the size of your group) of the whole course and you know the remaining portions are tidily inside your 'revision bible' ready for turning into essay plans, spider diagrams and all sorts of other fun to get it off the page and into your head. Getting to this stage is the end of the beginning.

One final point. This is not cheating. There is nothing to say that you shouldn't be collective in researching and recording information. However, when you have finished the revision bible, the thought that goes into your essay plans and arguments should be your own.

So, the message here: start acting like wild dogs. Hunt as a pack and life will be so, so much easier.