Removing the First Block to Learning

The first block (something that prevents progress) that can prevent you from becoming a
successful student in any subject is the willingness to know.

That is the first gate that has to be opened to begin any study because if that gate remains
closed, it will prevent you from understanding whatever you are trying to learn. You must be
willing to learn and find out about things you do not know.

If you study a subject when you think you already know all about it, you will run into trouble.
Instead of studying it to learn something new, and understanding it, you will get into such
things as trying to learn the facts word for word without understanding them. You can get
into memorizing them so you don’t forget them and other odd things like that. None of these
systems or ways of doing things add up to any knowledge and they don’t make you more
capable.

To be able to study a subject, you have to be willing to study it to find out what there is to be
learned.

If you start a study with the idea that you already know about that subject and think you know
everything there is to know about it, studying it would be a waste of time. Why waste your
time pretending you are studying something that you decided you already knew all about? If
you do this, you can make the whole subject of study difficult.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore the things you do know that are valuable. It takes a bit
of judgment to be able to look over a subject and know what you know and know what you
don’t know about it. But it can be done.

You can say to yourself, “Well, there are parts of this I don’t know anything about and I will
have to look into it and study what there is to know about it.” When you can do this, you have
overcome the first obstacle to learning.

What it boils down to is this: Your ability to learn depends on a willingness to learn.

And: The biggest single block to learning is your decision that you already know all about it.

This is the door you have got to crack open.

And once you have cracked that door open, you can learn anything from there on, with the
use of Study Technology.
 The Barriers to Study

Once you have opened the first gate to learning and decided there is something to know about
study, you are ready to learn The Barriers to Study. There are just three of them.

A barrier is something that can stop you or prevent you from making progress.

As you will learn, when you run into one of the barriers to study, it can actually make you
feel physically and mentally uncomfortable. Feeling discomfort as a result of something is
also known as a reaction. Reaction means a physical or emotional feeling you get as a result
of something. You could get a reaction from a sudden loud crashing noise, such as a car
accident, and perhaps respond by feeling nervous or a bit upset and concerned.

When you have a reaction, you can show your feelings by the expression on your face or how
you handle your body. This is known as a manifestation. Manifestation means a visible sign
or indication that something exists or is happening. For example, upon hearing an accident,
you can manifest being upset and concerned by looking or even acting nervous.

You can also get a reaction from good news and feel terrific. You can manifest it by smiling,
laughing, cheering and looking happy.

Each of the three barriers to study gives you very exact physical and mental reactions and
manifestations.

When you know the manifestations of each barrier, it is very easy to tell which barrier you
have run up against. And for each barrier, there are exact steps you will learn to handle and
get that barrier out of your road to study so you can progress well in your learning.

Once you know what the three barriers are, know the difference between them and know
what to do to get them out of your way, you can prevent all three barriers from ever stopping
you again.

And by knowing and using this technology, you will be able to successfully study and learn
any subject.
 The First Barrier to Study:
Absence of Mass
In the study of any subject, you have both mass and significance.

Mass means the actual physical objects that you are learning about, rather than their
meanings or ideas about them. These include things such as computers, a car, a rock, the
wind, light, heat, birds, trees, animals, etc.

Significance of a subject refers to the meaning or ideas or rules about something, rather than
its existence as an actual physical object.

For example, if you were learning how to swim, the mass would include the water, the pool,
the kickboard, the flotation vest to hold you up, etc. The significance would include how you
hold the board, how you kick your legs, how you breathe, etc.

If you were studying how to play a guitar, the instrument would be the mass. The significance
would include instructions on how to hold the guitar, how to make various notes, how
to strum the guitar, etc.

A person needs mass as well as significance to help him understand something. Without any
mass, he only has thoughts and significances.

So, the first barrier to study is this: education in the absence of the mass in which the
technology will be involved is very hard on a student.

Education in the absence of mass makes you feel:

Squashed (feeling that you can’t achieve something and have given up even trying, as if you
had been pressed or flattened with force)

Bent (feeling as if you were not standing up straight, but with the top part of your body
leaning forward and down)
Sort of spinny (feeling as if your mind was spinning, turning rapidly in circles)

Sort of dead (a feeling lacking liveliness, enthusiasm or interest)

Bored (feeling tired and impatient because of having lost interest in something)

Exasperated (feeling very irritated and upset because things are not the way you want them)
If you are studying something in which the mass is absent, the above reactions and
manifestations will be the result.

To help handle the absence of mass, photographs help and motion pictures would do pretty
good, as they are like a promise or hope of the mass. But the printed page and the spoken
word are not a substitute for a tractor if you are studying about tractors.

You have to understand this important fact: being educated about something where you don’t
have the mass makes you feel physically uncomfortable in the ways listed above.

It’s just a fact. Let’s say you are studying all about tractors and you don’t have any tractors to
give you a balance of the mass. You are going to wind up with:

A face that feels squashed

Headaches

A dizzy feeling from time to time

Your stomach feeling funny

Very often your eyes are going to hurt.

For example, if you were reading about tractors, the best thing to have so you get a balance of
the mass and significance is an actual tractor that you can see, touch and feel.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you had a child who was having difficulty learning
arithmetic at school. All he had was the significance of the figures he was being asked to add
up in his head or write down and add up on a blackboard or on a piece of paper. The absence
of mass could be the barrier that was giving him trouble.

The remedy would be to give the child the mass to balance out the significance of what he
was studying. For example, get him some apples and give each one of them a number. Now
he has a number of apples in front of him and there is no longer just the significance. By
doing this, you would remedy his absence of mass and undo the difficulty he was having.
This barrier of studying something without its mass ever being around produces the most
clearly recognizable physical reactions.
 Remedying the First Barrier to Study:
The Absence of Mass
Since not everyone studying something has the actual mass of what they are studying
available—such as a tractor or apples—useful tools to remedy a lack of mass have been
developed. These come under the subject of demonstration.

Demonstration means the action of showing or pointing out something to make it clear how
something is done or how it works. It also means teaching or showing by doing something.

One way to supply the mass and help sort things out is to do a demonstration. There is a very
simple type of demonstration commonly used in study that will help you get a balance of
mass with the significance you are studying. It is to use a demonstration kit.

1. DEMONSTRATION KIT

A kit is a group of things that are kept together, often in the same container, so that they can
be used for a particular purpose.

A demonstration kit or demo kit is a collection of various small objects such as corks, bottle
caps, paper clips, pen tops, rubber bands, etc. The objects are used to demonstrate (show)
something in order to help you to understand it.

The pieces of a demo kit are usually stored in a container and ready for use in demonstrating
ideas, facts, laws and even showing the meanings of words. Factually, anything can be
demonstrated using a demo kit.

You can use the objects and items in a demo kit on a table or desk to demonstrate anything
you are studying.
The basic purpose of a demo kit is to demonstrate understanding.

If you run into something you are studying that you can’t figure out, a demo kit can help you
sort it out and understand it. Let’s say you realize there is a series of steps to doing something
and it isn’t clear to you, so you use the mass of a demo kit to work it out.

Let’s take the example of a very simple action you might need to demonstrate, such as
making a cup of tea. You could use a demo kit to get some mass and help you work out the
steps. You might:

Use a bottle cap to represent the kettle and a rubber band to represent the water that goes into
the kettle.

Use some paper clips to represent the fire or stove top on which you put the kettle to heat the
water.

Use pen tops to represent the cup and a cork to represent the teapot into which you add the
tea (using another object from the demo kit).

Now you can lift the kettle off the fire or stove and add the water and tea to the pot, pour the
tea into the cup and, using other items from the kit, add milk or cream and a sweetener.

As the first barrier to study is an absence of mass, using the solid items of a demo kit to
represent the significances you are sorting out is one way to add the mass you need for
understanding.

2. CLAY DEMONSTRATIONS

An extremely valuable tool in studying any subject is the use of clay to demonstrate
something. It could be ideas, facts, laws or even showing the meanings of words or any part
of anything you are studying. This is called a “clay demonstration” or “clay demo.”

The purposes of clay demonstration are:

1. To make the materials being studied real to you by demonstrating them in clay

2. To give you a proper balance of mass and significance

3. To teach you to apply

You use your hands and clay to make rough models of the objects, people or significances
you are studying. This is done to get a full balance of the mass with the significance and to
figure out and sort out anything you might be confused about.

You can use several different colors of clay, but the colors don’t have any special meaning.
Colors are only used to help you see the differences between objects, people and the things
you make in clay.

Anything at all can be represented in clay. There are no limits to what you can make and
show in a clay demonstration. The only limitation could be your lack of understanding.
If you can show something in a clay demonstration, you understand it. If you can’t, you really
don’t understand what it is. When you work things out in a clay demonstration, it actually
helps bring about an understanding of them.

Your clay must show the subject you are representing. It must not be just a blob of clay. But
art has nothing to do with clay demonstrations. What you make in clay does not have to look
beautiful. The objects you make do not have to include small details. They can be rough
models to represent the objects you are making.

But your clay demonstrations must be large.

If you make a small clay demonstration, you will not be following the purpose of why you
are making it in clay. It is the mass of the clay that helps you to understand and work things
out. Small demonstrations don’t have much mass. Making large objects, people and things in
your clay demonstration gives you lots of mass and that is a very important part of what you
are doing.

Labeling

Everything you make in clay must be labeled and you must label each part as you go along.
You can make labels out of small strips of paper or a card.

You don’t make all the objects and then come back and put labels on all of them. As you
make an object, you label it. Then make the next object and label it and so on. You must do
this to keep the balance of mass and significance as you keep going.

When you have completed the whole clay demonstration, you make one overall label that
describes what it is.

If someone is helping you with your study, you can show him your clay demonstration, but
do not show him the overall label and do not say anything—just let him see what you did. He
just looks at your clay and figures out what it is and tells you. Then you show him your
overall label.

If he can just look at and understand the demonstration and see what you have made in clay,
without you explaining it to him or showing him the overall label, you know your
demonstration was successfully done.

Example:

For example, let’s say you need to do a clay demonstration of a pencil. You would make a
thin roll of clay to represent the lead and an outer layer of clay to represent the wood, with the
thin lead sticking out a bit at one end. You label the thin roll “lead” and label the outer layer
“wood.”

You make a small cylinder of clay and stick it on one end and label it “rubber” or “eraser.”
Then you make an overall label saying “It is a pencil.”

When you are done with your clay demonstration you can show it to someone else if you like,
especially someone working with you to help you with your studies. But first you must
remove the overall label, “pencil,” before he can see it. Then, if he can look at your demo and
say, “It’s a pencil,” you know you have successfully demonstrated it in clay.

The direction in which something travels is usually shown with a little arrow made of clay
and labeled as to what it represents.

This is important because sometimes a clay demonstration can be confusing if you cannot see
the direction things are moving or the sequence of something that happens.

3. SKETCHING

Sketching is the action of making a simple, quick drawing that does not show much detail.

Sketching is also a part of demonstration and is something you can do to give a balance of
mass with significance and help you work things out.

You can be sitting at a desk, trying to work something out or studying something that you
can’t grasp. You can take a pencil and paper and sketch it out and get a grip on it. Let’s say
you wanted to work out a plan or something for a chart—you could do a sketch to help clarify
it for yourself.
 The Second Barrier to Study:
Too Steep a Study Gradient
The word gradient means how steep something is, such as how much a road slopes upward or
slopes downward or how steep the side of a mountain is.

In the subject of study, a gradient is a way of gradually learning new information or skills
little by little, step by step and level by level, with each step or level being easily learned by
itself. This would be a light gradient. Done on such a gradient, even complicated and difficult
subjects and actions can be studied, understood and carried out quite easily.

The word “gradient” also applies to each of the steps that are taken in this way of learning.

Let us take, for example, a young person learning to ride a bicycle. There is a usual gradient
of steps that are followed when learning the art of balance, steering, pedaling and all the
actions that need to be taken to be able to ride a bicycle.

The first step is usually to have the person learn how to ride a tricycle, a vehicle with one
large front wheel and two smaller back wheels. It does not require any balancing and is very
easy to ride.

Once he has learned how to ride a tricycle and can do it well, the second step in the gradient
might be to have him learn to ride a balance bike. This is a vehicle with two large wheels and
two smaller rear wheels. The smaller wheels just assist him so he does not have to
concentrate on balance yet. It’s a little harder to ride, but is still quite simple.

Then, as a final step in the gradient, he learns how to coordinate all needed actions and can
ride the bicycle without any assistance.

Studying or learning how to do something is best done on a gradient. But it doesn’t always go
that way and that’s when you can run into trouble, unless you know how to spot and handle
this barrier.

The second barrier to study is: Too steep a study gradient.

Going too steeply or skipping a step on a gradient is different to any of the other barriers. The
physical and mental reactions from this barrier are very easy to see when you are learning to
actually do something or perform some action or activity.

When you run into too steep a gradient in studying something, it produces a sort of confusion
or reelingness (feeling dizzy and unsteady).

Here’s an example. Let us say you were installing or learning how to use a new program on
your computer. You read the first few steps and you understand them and you follow them
and are doing well.

What you are doing continues to go well until you realize you aren’t doing well anymore.
Let’s say you have started feeling confused and you experience a sort of reelingness (feeling
dizzy and unsteady). This reaction tells you at once that you hit too steep a gradient. You
went past something you did not fully grasp and went over the gradient.

What will happen is that you will think the trouble you are having started when you began the
new step of the computer program, when you first started feeling confused and experiencing
the reelingness. But that isn’t where you jumped the gradient. You skipped the gradient on
something earlier. There was something that you were doing on the computer program earlier
that you didn’t understand. You went past it and you hit too high a level. You went too fast
into a higher gradient.

The barrier of too steep a gradient is most easily recognized and most often used when you
are involved in doing some new action—in other words, when you are physically going
through the motions of something that is new to you.
 Remedying the Second Barrier to Study:
Too Steep a Study Gradient
If you are learning how to do something and you start to feel a sort of confusion or
reelingness, you know at once that you have hit too steep a gradient. You went past
something you did not understand and started on the next thing that was too steep and you
went too fast.

The remedy for the barrier of too steep a gradient is as follows:

1. Cut back on the gradient. This means stop trying to push ahead and go back to where you
were last doing well.

2. Find out when you were not confused on the gradient.

3. Then find what new action you undertook.

4. Find out what action you were doing that you understood well.

5. You will find that you didn’t understand it well. There was something you did not grasp at
the tail end of what you understood well and after that you went over the gradient.

6. Clear up what you did not understand.

7. Once you have cleared up what you did not understand, proceed on from there.

In gradients, it is the actions you are interested in. You have a specific series of steps you
must do. And if you skip the gradient on doing those steps, you can run into trouble. But if
you follow the steps of how to handle a skipped gradient, you will come out of it.

In the first example of the young person who learned how to ride a bicycle on a gradient, let’s
say he went too steep on the gradient and started trying to ride the bicycle before he had
mastered the earlier step and then he ran into trouble.

Let’s say he manifested this by not being able to grasp how to maintain balance and pedal
and steer the bicycle all at the same time. Say he became sort of confused or reeling (felt
dizzy and unsteady) and kept falling off the bicycle. You would simply have him cut back the
gradient and go back to the earlier step where he was doing well—this may have been
the balance bike with two supporting rear wheels.
You would help him by finding out where he was doing well on the earlier steps of the
gradient and then discovering what it was that he did not fully understand about that earlier
step. Once that was cleared up and he was happy about doing that step, you would have him
progress back up to the next gradient again. He would do well.

In the example where you possibly ran into too steep a study gradient learning how to install
or use a new computer program, you would simply go back to the part of the computer
program you were using that you understood well and were doing fine on, just before you
started having trouble. Then you would clear up what you did not understand and move on
forward from there.

This same principle of the skipped gradient and the steps for handling it are tools you can use
on anything you are studying or learning how to do.
 The Third Barrier to Study:
The Misunderstood Word
The third and most important barrier to study is: The misunderstood word. A misunderstood
word is a word which is not understood or is wrongly understood.

An entirely different set of reactions result from a misunderstood word.

When you go past a word that you do not understand the meaning of, you can get a blank
feeling that is very noticeable and easy to recognize. It is a feeling or showing of a complete
lack of awareness, memory or understanding, as if your mind is empty.

A misunderstood word can also give you a washed-out feeling (a feeling of being very tired
and not having any strength or energy).

It can give you a not-there feeling (not being fully aware of or connected to the situation you
are in). It will be followed by a sort of nervous hysteria (a state of extreme
or exaggerated emotion or excitement that can also include a feeling of worry and fear,
especially about something that you feel is going to happen).

The misunderstood word is what can make a person feel stupid or dumb in any subject.

This third barrier to study, the misunderstood word, is the most important of the three
barriers. It influences your ability to do.

For example, if you were studying the subject of art and learning how to paint, you would be
able to do the actions of painting and get actively involved if you did not have any
misunderstood words on the subject. You might not have the talent to be a great painter, but
you would have the ability to do the actions of painting. But that might not be the case if you
had words on the subject that you did not fully understand.

Misunderstood words reduce your ability to do.

The Phenomena of the Misunderstood Word

The word phenomena is the plural of phenomenon. A phenomenon is something that happens
or exists that can be seen.

To show how this works, let us take an example of you as a student going past words in your
studies that you do not understand.

There are two distinct phenomena that result from a misunderstood word:

First Phenomenon

When you misunderstand a word, the section right after that word is a blank in your memory.

You can always trace back to the word just before the blank. Go back to where you first felt
blank and look just before that to find the word you did not fully understand. You can then
get the meaning of the misunderstood word by looking it up in the dictionary and
understanding what it means. By doing this, you will miraculously find that the section of
text you were studying is now not blank. This is pure magic.

Here is an example: “It was found that when the crepuscule arrived, the children were quieter
and when it was not present, they were much livelier.”

What happens is you think you do not understand the whole idea, but the inability to
understand comes entirely from the one word you could not define—crepuscule. It means
twilight—the period just before it becomes completely dark in the evening.

Once you understand the word crepuscule, the whole sentence can be understood.

Second Phenomenon

A misunderstood definition or a not-understood definition, or a word you have not been able
to find the meaning of, can even cause you to give up studying a subject and make you
suddenly drop it or even leave the area. This is called a blow. A blow is when you suddenly
drop doing something or suddenly leave somewhere.

Sudden departures from studying a subject or a course or suddenly leaving a class are the
result of a misunderstood word.

We have all known people who enthusiastically started on a study only to find out some time
later that the person dropped the study because it was “boring” or “it wasn’t what they
thought it would be.” For example, they were going to learn a skill or go to night school and
get their degree, but they never completed doing what they set out to do.

No matter how reasonable their excuses, the fact is they dropped the subject or left the
course. This was a blow.
A person blows for one primary reason—the misunderstood word.

The rule is this: the reason you suddenly give up doing something is because you have
misunderstoods on the subject. By finding and clearing up the words and getting a full
understanding of their meaning, you can acquire an ability to do something again.

Although this barrier—the misunderstood word—is given last, it is by far the most important
and has the furthest-reaching effects.

The action of finding the meaning and getting an understanding of words that were
misunderstood can produce the most miraculous results.

This technology of the misunderstood word opens the gate to education.

 Remedying the Third Barrier to Study:
The Misunderstood Word

A misunderstood word will remain misunderstood until you clear the meaning of that word.

You clear a word by looking up its meaning in a dictionary and getting a full understanding
of that word.

Once you have looked up all the definitions of a word and you fully understand the word and
you know how to use it, that word can be called cleared. That’s because its meaning and use
are clear to you and there is nothing about the word that you do not understand.

There are exact steps to follow to clear any word you come across in your studies that you do
not understand.

Steps to Clear a Word

1. Have a good dictionary close by and available while reading so you can look up the
meaning of any word you do not fully understand. A good dictionary does not include
difficult words in the definitions. A good dictionary makes it possible for you to clear a word
without having to look up a lot of other words too.

2. When you come across a word or a symbol that you do not understand, find it in your
dictionary. If more than one meaning is listed, quickly look over each of the definitions to
find the one which best fits and explains the word in the context it was used. Context means
the words or short sections of words that come before or after a particular word that help to
explain its full meaning. For example, the context of the word “bat” is different in these two
sentences and, as you can see, the sentence helps to explain what the word means:

1. He picked up a bat and hit the ball.

2. He saw the bat fly up into the tree.

Read the definition that applies to the correct context and make sure you fully understand it.
For example, a dictionary might list the following:

bat:

1. a stick or club used to

strike a ball in sports.

2. a small animal like a mouse that has

wings and flies around at night.
Dictionaries usually give examples of how a word is used in a sentence. But to clear the
word, you must make up sentences of your own using that word until a) you fully understand
it, b) you are comfortable using it and c) you have a clear understanding of the meaning of
that word.

When you fully understand a word, you do not have to think about it. You just know it. You
might need to make up ten or more sentences to get a full understanding of that word.

3. The next step is to clear each of the other listed definitions of that word. Read the
definition and clear up anything in the listed meaning you do not understand. Use the word
with that meaning in several sentences until you understand it. Then take the next definition,
read it and use it in sentences.

Continue like this until you have cleared each of the listed definitions in sentences and have a
full understanding of each one. When a word has several different meanings, you can’t just
clear one definition and say you fully understand the word. You must be able to understand
the word when you see it again with a different meaning. So clear each of the listed
definitions.

4. The next thing to do is to clear the derivation. This means where the word came
from. Knowing where the word came from will help you get a basic understanding of the
word.

5. The dictionary you are using might include idioms in the definition. An idiom is a group of
words that, when used together, has a meaning different from what the words would suggest
with their usual meaning. For example, to catch someone’s eye is an idiom meaning “to get
someone’s attention.” If there are any idioms listed in the dictionary for the word you are
looking up, read them and use them in sentences until you have an understanding of them.

6. Clear any other information about the word that might be listed in the dictionary, such as
notes on how it is used (its usage) and any synonyms. Synonyms are words that have a similar
meaning, but are not the same. For example, “thin” and “slim” are synonyms.

7. If you see a misunderstood word or symbol in any of the definitions, idioms or synonyms
of a word you are looking up, you must clear it right away using the same procedure listed
above. Then return to the definition you were originally clearing.

The meanings of symbols and abbreviations used in a dictionary are usually included in the
front of the book and you can look them up there. However, if you find yourself spending a
lot of time clearing words or looking up the meaning of symbols or abbreviations, you should
get a simpler dictionary.

Here’s an example of using the above steps to clear a word. Let’s say you are reading the
sentence “He used to clean chimneys for a living,” and you’re not sure what “chimneys”
means.
You find “chimney” in the dictionary and look through the definitions and find the one that
best fits the context. The definition says “a flue for the smoke or gases from a fire.”

You’re not sure what “flue” means, so you look that up. The dictionary says a flue is “a pipe
through which smoke or heat from a fire can pass out of a building.” That fits and makes
sense, so you use it in some sentences until you have a clear understanding of it.

“Flue,” in this dictionary, has other definitions as well and you would clear and use each in
sentences.

Next, look up the derivation of the word “flue.”

When you have fully cleared the word “flue,” go back to “chimney.” The definition, “a flue
for the smoke or gases from a fire,” now makes sense, so you use the word “chimney” in
sentences until you have a clear understanding of it.

You then clear the other definitions. Let’s say the dictionary has an obsolete (old and no
longer used) definition and another definition that is listed as being geological (having to do
with the study of rocks and minerals). You would skip both of these, as they aren’t in
common use.

Now clear up the derivation of the word “chimney.” You find in the derivation that it
originally came from the Greek word “kaminos,” which means “furnace.”

If the word had any synonyms, usage notes or idioms, they would all be cleared too.

That would be the end of clearing “chimney.”

This is the way any word should be cleared.

Simple Words

When looking up and clearing words in a dictionary, remember that it is not just the big
words or technical words that are the most misunderstood.

An actual test on a group of students found that the most frequent words that prevented
understanding were simple English words, such as “a,” “the,” “exist,” “such,” etc.

To get the full meaning of these simple English words, and to get a real understanding of
them, it takes a big dictionary. Small dictionaries seem to suppose “everybody knows the
meaning of these small common words”—but many people don’t.

It is almost incredible to see that someone who has completed years of study on very difficult
subjects at a university, and has graduated, still does not know the meaning of words like
“or,” “by” or “an.” It is hard to believe, but it often happens. But when this student looks up
and finds the meanings of the words he did not understand, his years of study can be changed
from a lot of questions and confusions to a certainty and an understanding of what he learned.

What is a cleared word?

A cleared word is one which has been cleared to the point of full understanding by looking up
in a dictionary each of the common meanings of that word, plus
any technical or specialized meanings of that word that are connected to the subject you are
studying

Word Clearing

Clearing means the action of making something free of confusion or uncertainty. Word
Clearing means the methods or ways and actions of finding and getting rid of the lack of
knowledge, misunderstanding and false understanding of words and anything that blocks
their use.

There are several methods of Word Clearing. Two of them are given below to help you in
your studies and to make it possible for you to help others:

1. BASIC WORD CLEARING

Basic Word Clearing is the method of finding a misunderstood word by looking earlier in the
text than where you are having trouble.

When studying something, it is important to know how to keep yourself moving along and
doing well. To be a successful student, you should look up each word you come to that you
don’t understand. Never leave a word behind you that you don’t know the meaning of.

But if you ever run into trouble while studying, you would use Basic Word Clearing to help
you find and handle the misunderstood word that stopped your successful study progress.
Anyone helping you with your studies would use this method and you can also use it to help
anyone else.

As soon as you slow down or you don’t feel quite as “bright” as you did fifteen minutes ago,
that is the time to use Basic Word Clearing and look for the misunderstood word.
Don’t wait until you start feeling half asleep or are actually falling asleep while studying
something. That is waiting far too long to find and clear the misunderstood word. You went
past a word you did not fully understand long before you started to feel sleepy.

If you have ever seen another person falling asleep while reading a book, then you have seen
what happens well after the person went blank from passing a misunderstood word.

And remember that it is not a group of words or an idea that was misunderstood; it is a
misunderstood word. Going past a misunderstood word is always what happens first. It’s
what happens before a whole subject is misunderstood.

Basic Word Clearing is done as follows:

1. You realize that you are not moving along on your studies as fast as you were or that you
are not as bright as you were earlier. It might also be one of the following:

You are just not as interested in what you are studying.

You are taking too long to get through something.

You might be yawning.

You might be doodling (scribbling or making patterns or designs with a pen or pencil).

You might be daydreaming, etc.

2. As soon as this happens, you must stop and look earlier in what you were studying and find
the misunderstood word. There will always be one there and you must find it. There are no
exceptions. It may be that the misunderstood word is two pages or more before the place
where you stopped studying. But it is always earlier in the text than where you are now.
3. You find the word. You may recognize it while looking back for it, but if you can’t find it,
you or the person helping you with your study can pick out words from what you were
reading that could be the misunderstood word. Someone helping you can ask, “What does
______ mean?” to see if you give the correct definition.

4. When you have found the misunderstood word, you look it up in a dictionary and clear it
per the Steps to Clear a Word section of this course. You look up and clear the definition that
fits the context. You use it in sentences that you make up, until you fully understand it. Then
you clear each of the listed definitions and use each of them several times in sentences until
you fully understand the word. You then clear the derivation and any idioms or synonyms,
etc.

5. Now that you have a full understanding of the word, you go back to what you were reading
and once again read the part that contained the misunderstood word. If you are still not
“bright,” wanting to get on with it and feeling happier about it, then there is another
misunderstood word earlier in the text. You must find it and clear it by repeating steps 2 to 5
above.

6. When you feel bright and enthusiastic again, that is the end result of Basic Word Clearing.
(The result won’t be achieved if a word you did not understand was missed or if there is an
earlier misunderstood word in the text. If this happens, repeat steps 2 to 5.) If you are now
enthusiastic, continue studying the text from where the misunderstood was found and cleared.

In summary, the steps of Basic Word Clearing are as follows:

a. Find out where you weren’t having any trouble.

b. Find out where you are now having trouble.

c. The misunderstood word will be right at the end of where you weren’t having trouble. It
will be right in that immediate area. You can pinpoint it.

2. SIMPLE READING ALOUD WORD CLEARING

Whenever you are assisting children, people who speak a foreign language or someone who
is not able to read or write well, you can use Simple Reading Aloud Word Clearing to help
them.

The person is made to read aloud so you can find out what he is doing. The most surprising
things can happen, such as the following:

a. The person can leave out a word completely.

b. He can change a word to say something else.

c. He can hesitate when he sees certain words.

Simple Reading Aloud Word Clearing is done following the steps listed below. You and the
person who will be reading both have a copy of the same book or text in front of you.
When you are working with another person and doing the steps of Simple Reading Aloud
Word Clearing on that person, you are called the “word clearer” because you are helping him
to find and clear his misunderstood words. The person who is reading the text aloud and
receiving Word Clearing is referred to as the “student.”

PROCEDURE

1. You tell the student to read the text aloud while you follow along, reading the copy of the
material in front of you.

2. Each time he leaves out or changes a word or hesitates or frowns as he reads a word, take it
up at once.

3. Correct it by looking up the word he left out or changed or hesitated or frowned while
reading. Find the definition for him in a dictionary or explain it to him.

4. When you have cleared up the meaning of the word, get the student to go back to the book
or material and carry on reading and note the next time he leaves out or changes a word or
hesitates or frowns.

Each time this happens, you repeat steps 2 to 4 above.

By doing Simple Reading Aloud Word Clearing, you can help someone who is moving along
slowly while studying and also help the person to improve his ability to read.

After doing Simple Reading Aloud Word Clearing, the person’s next step would be to learn
how to use a dictionary to look up and clear the meaning of words himself as he goes along.