At Leaving School we never like to be the bearer of bad news. However, we feel it is our duty to tell you something that you’re probably not going to want to hear: within the next few months, you’ll probably have to do some exams.

And like every time you do exams, you’ll have to drag yourself through the process of getting your act together for revision. Things won’t get any more cheerful when it comes to actually doing the revision, either; hours of being chained to a desk and reading, re-reading and re-re-reading notes await you.

Or do they? Is there in fact another way you could revise without having to force yourself to spend hours on end staring at a computer screen, text book or piles of revision notes?

We reckon that there is, in fact, another way of doing things. It’ll sound a bit silly at first, and you will still have to do some of the confinement-in-the-library/bedroom stuff, but if you give this idea a go you might find that you can combine your revision with a bit of blessed freedom.

As we’ve rather unsubtely been trying to hint at, one of the worst aspects of doing revision is the physical act of reading. Not only does it mean that you have to stay cooped up indoors–try reading over your notes while simultaneously going for a walk in the countryside and time how long it takes before you fall over–but it also uses up a lot of your mental energy, hence why after about half an hour your brain is screaming at you to take a break.

But your eyes aren’t the only way that that pretty little head of yours can take in information. It can also do it using those flappy things on the side of your head. You know, the ones with the holes in. The things that pick up the noises.

Imagine if you could listen to your revision instead of reading it. Your eyes would be freed up, meaning you’d also get back your mobility–think about all those tasks you do while listening to your mp3 player–and you wouldn’t expend quite so much energy concentrating. And many people also find they retain information far more easily when they hear it compared with when they read it.

By this point you’ve probably picked up on a small spanner in the works: you don’t have an audio version of your notes. To that we say this: make one. All you need is your own voice and some sort of microphone to record it onto your computer. Just read your revision notes into it out loud, slowly and clearly. Then put them on your mp3 player. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If the idea of doing this makes you feel a bit self-conscious–and many people do hate the sound of their own voice–we have two alternative options for you. One is that many computers can read documents aloud, and so if you type your notes into the computer–maybe you’ve done this already–it can read them to you and your computer can record it.

Alternatively, if you can rope a friend into this crazy scheme of ours you can record one another’s revision notes, so they listen to you and you listen to them. If you’ve got the budget for it you could even get an actor or voiceover artist to do it for you. That’s your call, though.

But just imagine a world of audio revision notes. It’s one where you can combine revision with those other things you have to do in life, like catching the bus and going for a run. And who knows, maybe you’ll discover that you’ve got a natural talent in the spoken word and it’ll be the thing that finally made you realise your destiny was to be the next BBC continuity announcer.