By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Writing essays or long open-response questions is one of the hardest parts of school for many students. The reason writing assignments are challenging is that so many other skills besides writing are required for the task. Think about it: Writing a …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Annotating and note-taking are both school skills (and work skills!) that allow you to get more from the text you’re reading. But like with any skill, you need to know how and when to use it. In this blog post, I …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. If you regularly take notes in class, you’re far ahead of students who don’t take notes in class. Even if you’re taking notes on a napkin, that puts you light years ahead of students who don’t take notes at all. So, …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. You need to know how to analyze quotes in essays for high school, college, and beyond. Finding and including quotes to support your argument is an important first step, but the real skill is in how you analyze the quotes to …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Let me be clear: Although this blog post teaches you how to write an essay in a week, I am not suggesting that you ever rush your writing. Good writing takes time, planning, deep thinking, and revision. While one week is …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. This post teaches you how to take notes from a video. There are various scenarios when you’ll have to take notes from a video, especially for online classes. The following best practices apply to students in middle school, high school, college …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Before you learn how to take notes from a textbook, you need to make two key decisions. Where will you take your notes, and what note-taking format will you choose? I explain both decisions below. Where to take your textbook notes …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Knowing how to write a summary of a text is one of the most important skills for school and work. It’s even important outside of school, like in everyday conversations with people (Hey, what was that movie about? How’s that book …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Have you ever read a poem, made it to the last line, only to realize that you have absolutely no idea what it’s about? Cool. Keep reading. Students begin to analyze poetry in elementary school, and often have to do so …
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. One of the most common questions I get when I’m tutoring students for the SAT or ACT is what’s the difference between a colon and a semicolon? It’s a good question, and fortunately the answer is not that complicated. With that …