I am Robinson Lumontod III, a registered psychometrician, university instructor, and academic researcher with several published papers in psychology. I teach, I supervise student research, and I spend most of my working life watching people study.
Why I wrote this
I did not set out to study studying. I set out to pass a licensure exam.
Preparing for it meant getting through more than twenty books, and I did what I had always done: read carefully, mark the important parts, make sure each section made sense before moving on. At the end of an evening I would close the book feeling that I had covered something real.
Then I would come back to that chapter a week later and find almost nothing left.
That is a specific kind of alarming, because it comes with arithmetic attached. If a week of work evaporates in a week, twenty books is not twenty books. It is twenty books read over and over, forever, and there was not enough time before the exam for forever.
Then I started teaching
What I assumed was a problem with me turned out to be the ordinary condition of almost every student I have taught since.
I watch first-year students reread a chapter four times and arrive at the exam unable to produce a definition they could have recognised instantly the night before. I watch capable graduate students lose a semester to a thesis they understand perfectly and cannot start. I watch my strongest students revise the material they already know, because revising what they do not know feels like failing, and the exam does not care which was more comfortable.
None of them are lazy. Most of them are working harder than the students getting better marks. They are using methods that feel productive and are not, and nobody has ever told them there is a difference.
Who the book is for
Anyone facing more material than time. That covers a first-year undergraduate with four finals in one week, a graduate student trying to hold a literature review in their head, and a board candidate working through a review centre’s reading list. The specifics differ and Part IV deals with them separately, but the underlying failure is the same one, and so is the fix.
It is also written for teachers, who are usually the ones handing out study advice and rarely the ones given any evidence about it.
What I do now
Alongside teaching, I do research and publish in psychology. My published work is listed on my ResearchGate profile:
researchgate.net/profile/Robinson-Lumontod-Iii
My own work is quantitative, which matters for this book in a practical way: I read the studies behind it in the original rather than through somebody else’s summary, and I can tell the difference between a finding that has held up across large samples and one resting on forty undergraduates and a striking headline. A great deal of popular study advice is the second kind.
I first wrote about this in 2017, in a short self-published book. Etched is what I would have written if I had known then what the evidence actually said.
How I work
Every claim in the book is attached to a named published study, and where the evidence is weaker than the popular version suggests, I say so. There are techniques in wide circulation that do not survive contact with the research, and leaving them out was not an oversight — Appendix A lists them and explains why.
If you find an error, tell me. I would rather fix it than defend it.