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Hey guys,
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welcome back to the channel. If you are new here, my name is Ali
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I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video
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I'm going to share with you the essay memorization framework that I
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used when I was in my third year at Cambridge University.
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That was the year,
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in which I was studying psychology and I actually ended up winning the prize for best
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exam performance in the year (yay) group and I've pretty much exclusively
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attributed that to this essay memorization framework
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This method should work for most essay based subjects,
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but even if your subject is an essay based
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I hope you might still find this video useful and pick up a
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few tips and techniques along the way and of course, everything I'm
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going to mention is going to be linked in timestamps in the video
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description and in a pinned comment so you can skip around the
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video if you feel like it, let's just jump into it
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So there are basically two stages to this method.
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The first stage is the creation stage
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and the second stage is the memorization stage.
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So in the creation stage, the objective is to create
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first-class essay plans for every conceivable
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essay title that they could throw at us in the exam.
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And in the memorization stage,
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we're going to be committing all of these essay plans to memory
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by systematically using active recall, spaced repetition,
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spider diagrams, and flashcards.
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The idea is that by the time the exam rolls around,
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you'll have memorized so many essay plans that a lot of them will
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just come up in the exam anyway
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because you've predicted the titles and you'll just
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be able to regurgitate stuff from your brain onto the paper,
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but even if stuff comes up that you haven't memorized
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You'll know so much about the subject and you'll have so many
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content blocks in your head that you'll be able to generate a first-class
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Essay from scratch.
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So that was a general overview.
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Let's now talk about the two components: the creation state and the memorization stage in turn.
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So the broad objective of the creation stage is to create a large
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number of really really good essay plans that you can then memorize
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In the memorization stage and regurgitate onto paper during your exam.
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Now, it's probably beyond the scope of this video for me
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to teach you how to write a good essay and
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probably also beyond the scope of my own expertise.
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But I will share some tips on three main questions and that's
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firstly how you decide what essay titles to pick.
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Secondly, how you plan the essay and thirdly how you make sure your essay plan is really really good.
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So let's deal with those in turn so firstly how do we decide what I say is we're going to prepare
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the objective here is to scope the subject and find essay
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titles that cover the entire breadth of the syllabus. Now the easiest way to
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do this is to look at past papers and look at whatever pause papers you
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have available and see what essays have come up in
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the past and you start off with those and then once you've planned
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out those essays, you'll know enough about that subject in particular
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that you'll be able to put yourself in the shoes of examiner's and start thinking,
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"okay
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what's a good essay titled that I've not yet asked about?"
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If you haven't got past papers available that I'm very sorry to hear that.
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You're just gonna have to put yourself into the examiners shoes from the get-go
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or you can actually go to your teacher, your professor, your lecturer, or whatever and say, "hey,
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what's the sort of essays that might come up in the exam? What are some things other things
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I should be thinking about?
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So, having made a list of what essays we're going to plan,
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we then need to actually plan those essays and this is the fun part.
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This is the part that actually requires doing some doing some cognitive labor
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So the way I would do this is that I'd give myself one day per essay plan.
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So in, in the first time of uni
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I was a slacker only made like five essay plans.
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In the second term I made about ten, and then, in the Easter holidays
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i've really ramped it up and made about 35 different ones.
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And the way I do it is that i'd start off with a question.
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So, for example, do animals have a theory of mind and then I would use Google
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To get as much information as I can about that particular question
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I would ignore the lecture notes initially
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and I would ignore the recommended reading
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I'd start off with Google because Google was, it was like a really
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good way to find the answer to any question that you want.
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And often I'd be linked to review articles and review papers,
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and I'd be reading through those review papers
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Oftentimes, the review paper would directly answer the question,
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in which case I've pretty much got my essay.
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I just need to turn it into my own words,
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but a lot of the time, I'd be following references from the route
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from the review paper. And then,
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once I'd created my essay plan
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I would then look at the lecture notes and the recommended reading
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and this meant that a lot of my material was hopefully more original
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than everyone else's because most of the students
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would have built their essays based around the lecture notes.
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Whereas I was building my essays on a random Google search.
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So, I would start off by creating a research document on
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that particular topic and pretty much copy and paste every relevant bit of every
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paper I could find.
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So, this is my 10 page document about theory of mind.
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I've copied and pasted various bits and rephrased various bits.
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And you know, very random. I don't even know any of this anymore.
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This is, and you, know included links at the bottom to
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where I got the information from so if I need to return to it,
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I'll be able to find it again.
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And then once I've got my research document, I spent the next few hours
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planning out the essay and actually writing it out properly.
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So, here is my plan, "Is theory of mind a useful concept for understanding social cognition and animals?" And
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yeah, I've got an intro, I've got a preamble, I've got subheadings,
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I've got evidence
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And I've basically taken all of this from these various
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different resources from books, from the review papers, from the lecture notes, from Google.
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And I've consolidated them into this one essay that I'm
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ultimately going to memorize. And as you can see over here,
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I've pretty much done this for everything within my subject.
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So this is Section B, "Comparative Cognition,"
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which is all about the thinking of animals, can an animal's plan for the future?
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Causality, Cognitive Maps, the Convergent Evolution Theory of Intelligence.
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"Do animals have a theory of mind?" "Is a theorem an useful concept." And you can see here,
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I've written an key beside them,
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which is a foreshadowing as to what's gonna come later in this video.
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So now we've done a research document. We've planned this essay.
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We've pretty much written it out based on a research document
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and we've only given ourselves one day to do this because of Parkinson's law.
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That work expands to fill the time we allocate to it.
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But how do we make the essay plan actually good.
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A lot of things go into good essay plan
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but in my opinion, there are three things that count .
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Number one, structure
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Number two, actually answering the question.
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And number three,
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having a bit of flair, a bit of a spice that you're sprinkling in your essay plan.
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And I think the introduction is the most important part of the essay.
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because in the introduction, you can signal to the examiner that
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you're doing all three of these things and when the examiner is marking your paper.
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They're probably really bored,
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they've read hundreds of these scripts already.
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You want to hit them with like a really legit introduction.
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So here's an example of an introduction from one of my essays about,
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"Weather judgment and decision making is cognitive,
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ideological, or affective ie. emotional."
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So, I written that, "The historical view in social sciences has always been that judgments
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are based solely on content information, with individuals being assumed
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to form judgments by systematically evaluating all available
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content information in an unbiased manner."
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Oh my god.
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However, over the past three decades a considerable
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amount of research has challenged this assumption by showing that
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Judgments may be formed not only
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on the basis of content information (cognitive judgments)
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but also on the basis of feelings (affective judgment).
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It is now well accepted that judgment can be both effective and cognitive."
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And here's where the good stuff comes
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"Whether it is one of the other depends on a multitude of factors;
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(1) the salience of the affective feelings, (2) the
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representativeness of the affective feelings for the target,
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(3) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment, (4) the evaluative
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malleability of the judgment, and (5) the level of processing intensity.
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And here is the ultimate clincher for this.
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"I will discuss these in
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turn and ultimately argue that generally speaking in day-to-day life,
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the circumstances are generally those that result an effective rather
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than cognitive and decision-making."
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So, if we can disentangle all the verbosity from that paragraph, what I've done is I've
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laid out the five main bits of the essay, in terms of structure
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and I've used numbered points for that rather than just a list
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because numbered makes it really really obvious to the examiner that I've got
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a good structure. I've also said exactly what the answer to the question is.
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The question is asking whether our judgments are cognitive,
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(biological?), or affective emotional and instead of wishingwatching around it,
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I have said in this essay, "I will argue that they are
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emotional rather than cognitive in most elements of day-to-day life."
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So I'm telling the examiner, "Look, I'm answering the question,
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this is what you're gonna get from me." And finally I've added a little bit of flair.
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Hopefully with this stuff about the historical context
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I probably got that from a textbook or from a review paper somewhere
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and I've probably phrased into my own notes
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and obviously this is just my plan.
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So in the exam, I won't quite be using it word-for-word.
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So, it's absolutely not plagiarism.
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It's using, you know, useful resources to create a bit of flair by adding a bit of historical context.
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So hopefully this introduction covers all three points:
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structure, answering question, and a bit of flair.
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Now, I'm gonna leave it at that for this section of the video.
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Obviously, you know, there are entire university courses andentire books
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and stuff, devoted to the art of writing a good essay.
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I don't personally think I'm very good at writing an essay,
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but I think I'm pretty good at using Google effectively and copying and pasting
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stuff into a research word document and then turning it into
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fairly legit sounding prose and
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then, I think I'm pretty good at systematically memorizing all that information.
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So,
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if you want to know more about how to write an essay,
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how I write an essay, then let me know in the comments and
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I'll maybe try and do a video on it if I can kind of break down the process a bit further.
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But now let's talk about stage two of the process:
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The memorization stage.
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Okay, so by this point,
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we've got a load of really good essay plans that we have created
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in Word documents. Now the objective in the memorization stage is to
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upload, all of those essay plans to our brain so that we canthen regurgitate
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them in the exam and we're gonna do this using
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three main techniques: Number one, ANKI flashcards.
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Number two, spider diagrams
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And number three, a retrospective revision timetable.
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So again,
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Let's talk about these in turn.
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So firstly, ANKI, and I've basically used Anki flashcards to memorize
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every paragraph, in every essay plan and this might seem a bit overkill, but it worked for me.
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So what I've done is as you can see,
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I've got keywords on the front of the card like "Bauer in 1984"
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or "Damisch et al 2006" or "Ellis
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et al 1997," or short-term versus long-term memory introduction.
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I've even put the introduction into an ANKI flashcard and then over time
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I'll memorize
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these, because pretty much anything that goes into my ANKI flashcards
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because during the exam term, I'm going through my flashcards every single day and
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I'm doing and keep spaced repetition algorithm.
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I just know that anything that that's in my ANKI is
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just going to get uploaded to my brain with a
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small amount of effort put in, by me, to actually actually memorize this stuff.
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So yeah, I've got I've got the keywords and I've got the content.
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So basically if I put you know a paper, Russell & Fehr in 1987."
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I'm describing in the ANKI flashcard what that paper shows, which means that overall I've
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create these blocks of content that every ANKI flashcard is his own little block
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and that block can slot into my essay that I've planned.
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But also, if a weird essay comes up that I haven't explicitly planned,
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I still have all these blocks of knowledge in my head,
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and that means if there is a paper that's relevant
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I'll know what it is. I'll know what the reference is. I'll know what the content is.
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I'll know how to describe the experiment and I'll just be able to put it into
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even new essays that I'm writing on the spot in the exam.
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So that's all well and good, but obviously knowing
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Tversky and Kahneman experiment from 1974 or Mussweiler & Strack from 2000,
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those things aren't that helpful,
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unless you can also associate them with their own essays andthat's
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where the spider diagrams is coming.
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All right,
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so the second prong of the memorization stage of the essay memorization
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framework involves spider diagrams
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and this is the book that I have made almost five diagrams in. So,
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having memorized a ton of content blocks from my essays using ANKI flashcards.