5 Study skills and time management

Learning how to summarise material in your own words and developing your academic voice can seem challenging.

Alongside developing this skill, you will be getting to grips with the subject-specific content of your course or module. Of course, you may have other demands on your time too, such as caring responsibilities, paid or unpaid employment, as well as trying to ensure you have some ‘downtime’ to relax and look after yourself.

When people are under time pressures, they are often unable to perform to their best abilities and may adopt poor study strategies. For example, they might copy a sentence of text directly from source material with the intention of summarising and re-writing in their own words at a later date, but then forget and submit work that is not all in their own words. Even though this is ‘unintentional’ this is still considered plagiarism.

Please don’t panic. In this section you’ll explore some study planning approaches to help you make the best of the time you have available.

Remember – different people work in different ways, and a study approach which suits one person perfectly, may not be appropriate for someone else. You might also find that as you progress through your study, you use different approaches depending on the task at hand, your current situation, other demands on your time and your experience of ‘what works for you’.