>>10906909>why am I so retarded and stupid?The problems you are talking about are actually extremely common. Even highly intelligent people face them, perhaps even more so because they're burdened by more thoughts.
>it takes me 3 reads to understand a paragraphSo, I learned this technique from a law clerk who carefully reads huge briefs, hundreds of pages long, every day. If you pay attention you'll see that tons of people do this, from professors to editors to attorneys and judges.
The solution is to read with a highlighter. (If reading on a computer, use your PDF reader's highlighter feature.) Try to highlight the most important, interesting, or unexepcted points. This forces you to engage with the material, almost like you're conversing with the document. You will find you don't have to look back as often, and when you do reread stuff, it will be much easier.
>and it can take me six hours just to write an essay or lab report.If you're like me, you can spend a whole hour writing and rewriting like 3 sentences and it takes all day to write a lab report.
The solution is to not edit while you write.
Step one is to write an outline of the stuff you're going to write.
Step two is make the sections of the paper based. So you should have a paper with just a bunch of bold section/subsection titles but no actual body text.
Step three: start brain dumping into each section. You should be "talking" to your word processor. Just like you can't delete words that you already spoke into the air, you don't use the delete key unless you're fixing a typo. If you suddenly think of a better way to write something you already wrote earlier, then just write the better way in the appropriate section, but don't delete anything you already wrote.
So now you'll have this big paper with a ton of text, go back and edit as normal. The quality of the paper will still depend on how many editing passes you do, but at least it will always be a complete paper you can hand in.
