The Blurting Method: How to Use It to Study (With Examples)

The blurting method is about as simple as studying gets: you read about a topic, put your notes away, and write down everything you can remember on a blank page. Then you check your notes and fill in what you missed in a different color.

It got popular with students on TikTok and YouTube, especially in the UK during GCSE and A-level season, but there's nothing trendy about why it works. It's a form of retrieval practice, and that's one of the most reliable ways to learn anything.

How to do the blurting method, step by step

1. Pick one small topic. Not "Unit 3." Something like "the stages of mitosis" or "causes of the French Revolution" or "the four types of operant conditioning." A topic you could explain in five minutes.
2. Study it for 10 to 15 minutes. Read your notes, the textbook section or your study guide. Pay attention, but don't take notes.
3. Close everything. Notes, slides, phone. Get a blank sheet of paper or a blank document.
4. Blurt. Write down everything you can remember about the topic: definitions, steps, examples, diagrams, dates, anything. Don't worry about order or neatness. Give yourself a time limit, like five to ten minutes, and keep going until you're truly stuck.
5. Check and fill in the gaps. Open your notes and compare. Add what you missed or got wrong in a different color pen.
6. Repeat later. A day or two later, blurt the same topic again on a fresh page. You'll usually remember more, and the red parts from last time show you what to focus on.

That's it. The whole loop takes about 25 minutes per topic.

Why it works

When you pull information out of your memory instead of reading it again, you make that memory stronger and easier to find later. In a classic experiment, students who read a passage once and then practiced recalling it remembered far more a week later than students who reread it several times, even though the rereaders felt more confident about how well they'd do (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006).

A later study compared free recall, which is basically blurting, with making concept maps while looking at the material. Students who practiced recall did better on the final test, including on questions that asked them to make inferences, not just repeat facts (Karpicke and Blunt, 2011).

There's a second benefit that's easy to miss: blurting shows you what you don't know. Rereading feels productive because everything looks familiar. A blank page is brutally honest. Whatever you couldn't write down is exactly what you need to study next.

An example blurt

Say you're studying cellular respiration for a biology midterm. After 15 minutes of reading, your blurt might look like this:

Cellular respiration: glucose + oxygen makes CO2, water and ATP. Three stages. Glycolysis in the cytoplasm, splits glucose into 2 pyruvate, makes 2 ATP. Krebs cycle in the mitochondria, makes NADH and FADH2, releases CO2. Electron transport chain on the inner membrane, makes most of the ATP, oxygen is the final electron acceptor. Without oxygen: fermentation??

When you check your notes, you add in red: glycolysis also makes 2 NADH; pyruvate is converted to acetyl-CoA before the Krebs cycle; fermentation regenerates NAD+ so glycolysis can continue; the total is roughly 30 to 32 ATP per glucose.

Those red notes are your study list for tomorrow.

Variations that work well

Timed blurting. Set a timer for five minutes. The pressure makes you retrieve faster and mirrors exam conditions.

Blurting out loud. Explain the topic out loud as if you were teaching it, and record yourself or have a friend follow along with your notes. Good for walking, commuting, or when you're tired of writing.

Diagram blurting. For anatomy, biology processes or anything visual, draw the diagram from memory instead of writing sentences, then compare with the real one.

Question blurting. Use the learning objectives or questions from your study guide as prompts. Answer each one from memory, then check.

Whole-unit blurting. The week before a final, blurt each unit's outline from memory: just the main headings and key ideas. It shows you which units need the most work.

Common mistakes

Picking a topic that's too big. If you try to blurt an entire chapter, you'll write a few vague lines and learn nothing about what you're missing. Keep topics small.

Peeking. The moment you look at your notes, it stops being retrieval practice. If you're stuck, stay stuck for a minute, then stop and check.

Skipping the check. Writing what you remember is half the method. Comparing with your notes and marking what you missed is the other half.

Only blurting once. The second and third blurts, spread over a few days, are where the material really sticks. Spacing your practice out like this is consistently better than doing it all at once (Cepeda et al., 2006).

Using it for everything. Blurting is great for concepts, processes and explanations. For hundreds of isolated facts, like drug names or vocabulary, flashcards are more efficient.

Blurting by subject

The method stays the same, but what a good blurt looks like changes by class.

A seven-day blurting plan before an exam

If your exam is a week out and you have a study guide with five or six topics, this schedule gets every topic blurted at least three times, spaced out:

Each session is short, 25 to 45 minutes, which leaves time for flashcards and your other classes.

How blurting fits into a study plan

Blurting works best as one part of your routine:

1. Make or get a study guide for the unit, organized by topic.
2. Blurt each topic the first time you study it.
3. Turn the details you keep missing into flashcards and review them a few minutes a day.
4. Take a practice test a few days before the exam to check everything under exam conditions.

If you're short on time, tools can handle the prep so you can spend more of it blurting. Revizly turns your slides or a PDF into a study guide, flashcards and a practice test in about a minute. The part that does the learning, closing the guide and writing what you know, is still up to you.

Is blurting good for every class?

It works for almost any class with content to understand and remember: biology, chemistry, history, psychology, nursing, law, economics. It's less useful for math and physics problem-solving, where the better equivalent is doing practice problems without looking at the worked solutions first. Even there, blurting the key formulas and when to use them is a good warm-up.

Next time you sit down to study, skip the highlighter. Read one topic, close your notes, and see what's actually in your head.

Sources

Blurting is a student-made name for something researchers have studied for a long time under the name retrieval practice. The studies cited above:

• Roediger, H. L., and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249 to 255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
• Karpicke, J. D., and Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772 to 775. doi:10.1126/science.1199327
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354 to 380. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354