Yeah, it’s embarrassing. Yeah, you might look silly. But talking to yourself is perhaps the best way to pound something into your brain. As you go through the steps of studying a question, you should talk them out. When you verbalize something, it makes it much harder to delude yourself into thinking that you’re working if you’re really not.

We are serious about this advice. Of course, it is just a suggestion. We can’t enforce it and, anyway, we don’t want to. But it is a nice little study trick. And it will help you.