Are you struggling to retain the information in your study materials?
Mastering new content is hard. Our brains work as hard to forget as they do to retain information. To make matters worse, many popular learning strategies, including re-reading and highlighting content, aren’t really effective.
Still, the ability to retain information from study materials is crucial. When you struggle to learn, you feel less confident in your abilities. Over time, failing to master essential content can cause you to lose valuable opportunities.
An alternative way to tackle new content
Luckily, there’s a learning strategy that works and isn’t overwhelming. It involves interacting with new information slowly, in stages, so that you can deepen your knowledge each time. This strategy frees you from having to use your weekends or breaks for in-depth reading and from forcing yourself to memorize information quickly before an exam. It’s called inspectional reading
, and it means previewing or outlining reading material before class.
When you preview a document, you look at titles, headings, boxes, lists, pictures, graphs, summaries, objectives, and other skimmable items to get a sense of its structure. This gives you a superficial understanding of the topic(s) covered. It also helps you familiarize yourself with certain keywords and concepts that, when talked about in class, activate and strengthen your memory. “Outlining is a proven learning strategy,” says Luc Beaudoin, adjunct professor of Cognitive Science and Education at Simon Fraser University.
Add a table of contents to a PDF to understand its structure
One of the best ways to outline a document is to create a table of contents (TOC) for it. This is a PDFpenPro feature. Using PDFpenPro, you can quickly add a TOC to a PDF by selecting its headings and subheadings and, within Edit > Table of Contents, choose Add Entry.
PDFpenPro’s table of contents feature allows you to:
- Create an entry by selecting a heading
- Add a child and an aunt to an entry
- Edit the text of an entry
- Demote an entry
- Promote an Entry
- Delete an Entry
What users say about the TOC feature
“With PDFpenPro you can make a table of contents for your Great American Novel.”
- Maria O. Arguello
“Now you can instantly jump from location to location in your PDF without having to go crazy scrolling (...) the benefits of not having to mess around with PDFs all over the place are huge.”
- Brooks Duncan
Add a table of contents to a PDF today
Using PDFpenPro, you canadd a table of contents to a document to understand its structure and become familiar with key terms and concepts.
The ability to add a table of contents is just one of PDFpenPro’s many useful features for students. To learn about the others, see PDFpen for Students: How to Learn Better with our PDF editor for Mac.
To test PDFpenPro’s TOC feature, download a 30-day free trial.