Getting started with revision

If you are stuck with revision or feeling overwhelmed by all the information you need to process, here is my suggestion on how to get going.

1. Look at your lecture and tutorial notes for the topic you are revising, and briefly identify its key themes, related historiography, and if relevant, theories.

2. Turn these key ideas into headings for whichever method of revising works for you. For example, you could use them as legs on a spider diagram, or devote a sheet of paper to each one. The important thing is to make sure you keep all the information reasonably categorised and easy to memorise, and organising your notes around very specific headings really helps with this.

3. Your revision material should be made up of your lecture and tutorial notes, essays, the main tutorial readings listed in the course outline, relevant notes from books you've read this year, and relevant chapters from useful overview books like Illife's Africans and John Parker's Very Short Introduction to provide context. Don't attempt to read whole new books from scratch at this stage. For additional material, particularly for the three topics on which you have not done essays, read digestible chunks such as journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, etc, which appear on the reading list for that topic.

4. Some people take more notes initially than others, but you need to keep reducing your notes down (however many stages this takes!) until you can fit everything you need onto about a side of A4 of trigger words and phrases. The process of doing this will help you memorise everything.

5. The final stage should be to practise making exam essay plans for each version of the question that you can find in the past papers. It is a really good idea to get used to doing this within the time limit you will have in the exam, which is about 10 minutes. These plans should be a maximum of half a side of A4. You can also practise writing out entire answers to past questions under timed conditions (45 mins). This seems laborious but is extremely helpful.