While doing your assignment or writing exams, you have probably found that you are expected to do quite a number of things with your academic texts.

Often you will need to argue a point of view, form an opinion or critically analyse academic text.

But before you do these difficult things, you need to have some basic study skills.

You will often need to memorise basic facts, ideas and key words. Thereafter, you will be able to develop and implement reasoning skills based on your sound foundation of facts.

In this section we will concentrate on a few learning skills you can try in your studies. But to generalise across all students and across all learning contexts without regard for how you, the individual student, would like to go about it, would be like trying to force you into a mould. So, in doing this we are not trying to force you into a mould, or insisting that all students should go about learning in the same way.

What we are trying to achieve, however, is that you choose the way you would like to learn; and adopt and use learning methods that you find useful.

Why do we sometimes find it difficult to change our patterns of learning? It is difficult, because: it is painful for some of us to unlearn rote learning techniques. - Unisa.ac.za