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Focus and taking in information when reading

Wombles

This is an odd problem but I wanted to post here to see if anyone else experiences this and has any work arounds.  I really struggle to take information from reading documents.  I will start reading it, but mind just wanders, especially if it is something that is not particularly stimulating.

I am adult with A levels and a degree, so I clearly managed to get through the learning process before.  What I used to do was write bullet points from a document as I was going through it (with each bullet point written in a different colour as I found that used to help me when trying to commit the bullet to memory).

I am wondering whether I need to go back to doing that - but that makes life when reading papers or documents at work rather cumbersome.  

Has anyone got any tips to help stay focused when reading documents, and more importantly, any tips to help try and retain the information that I am reading?

Parents

  • Hi, I have always struggled with this, I’m sad to say that I’ve only read two books in my life. I can read a paragraph about 4 times and still can’t process it. My spelling is really bad. I have researched into it and it seems I’m dyslexic and have adhd traits on top of autism. For writing now my wife bought me a keyboard for dyslexia, it’s interestingly colour coded into different areas and functions. It has helped massively. For reading books now, I use audiobooks as the voice blocks out other thoughts. I know that isn’t much help with documents. Have you thought of highlighting paragraphs with a highlighter pen, colour does seem to trigger how we store information. I have seen new pens that scan a paragraph and then turn it into an audio message, then fed into earphones or a mobile phone.

  • in reply to Roy

    I think the colour thing is the reason why I used to write different lines in different colour ink - it helped me see the start and end point of a paragraph.

    I did try changing the page colour at one point and that did seem to help.  It's quite easy to do that in Adobe Acrobat, but dear old microsoft make it virtually impossible to change the page colour from white, unless you go into reading view - in which case you can only change it to sepia.

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  • in reply to Roy

    I think the colour thing is the reason why I used to write different lines in different colour ink - it helped me see the start and end point of a paragraph.

    I did try changing the page colour at one point and that did seem to help.  It's quite easy to do that in Adobe Acrobat, but dear old microsoft make it virtually impossible to change the page colour from white, unless you go into reading view - in which case you can only change it to sepia.

Children
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