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I'm sure this thread will sink and die since /his/ doesn't read / is mainly shitposters from other boards, but I thought I'd take a stab at this:
I feel like my retention when I read books is quite high, but it tends to focus on concepts. I can give a pretty good sequence of events, linear or branching, and give a handful of reasons why they occur. I'm good at synthesizing information and applying it to problems.
But I always have to go back to reference materials to get the details - years, names, locations. This is problematic on two levels: one, it completely inhibits my ability to carry IRL convos about topics I can write about quite fluently, and it makes it where as I zoom into a subject and name recognition and such counts for a lot more to be able to understand things better, I have to pay very close attention and actively push my brain to think that way.
I currently annotate books and found that starting that in mid-high school improved my ability to handle concepts and get to where I am now. I'm starting my Ph.D. work soon, and I know that details will be important to retain for conference chit chat and such on top of the reasons I mentioned. Anyone who's gone through a grad program or is just really really good at remembering details have any tips for adapting annotations or just general reading strategy to retain names, dates, etc.?
tl;dr: How do I retain small details as well as I do concepts?
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Have you tried annotating the details in a conversational tone?
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i find myself in the same boat a lot of the time. i'm in the midst of doing a history undergrad myself with aims of a Ph.D myself one day, and i find myself taking lots of very detailed notes as i read.
pro: i retain a hell of a lot more than i would otherwise, and it is a massive aid while
con: it is really, really slow going. i have to really budget my time.
not sure how to bridge the gap here desu
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>>3162940
i'm currently reading a big summary of the history of my discipline as a refresher of undergrad and primer for stuff i might have missed, and i'm doing conversational sentences or bullets essentially once per extremely dense paragraph. it's slow going but starting to help my retention. i just know that as i move beyond reading this book and have to recall some of these fuckers' names (even major theorists), my brain is going to gradually calcify into the broad narrative of European intellectual history that i've learned and relearned and refined over all my high school and college years
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