Learning Outside the Lines

The full title is long: Learning Outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution. It came out in September 2000 as a Touchstone edition, under the Simon & Schuster umbrella. Some listings show 1999 as the first year of publication; most records say 2000. The page count varies from record to record between 286 and 294; the table of contents ends with the index on page 281. The foreword was written by Edward M. Hallowell, four pages.

I could not find a verified Turkish edition; I am writing it under its original title.

Let me say up front what I am basing this on. The piece relies on the book's table of contents, the publisher and retailer descriptions, some pieces discussing the book and reader reviews. I will not write as if I had read the text of every chapter; I will describe the chapters as far as I could verify them, and I will say where I could not.

Two authors, one conversation

Jonathan Mooney is a writer with dyslexia and ADHD. The detail that stands out in every description written about him is that he could not learn to read until he was twelve. He started at Loyola Marymount, transferred to Brown University, and graduated there with honors in English literature. In the following years he wrote The Short Bus (2007) and Normal Sucks (2019). The subtitle of Normal Sucks is How to Live, Learn, and Thrive Outside the Lines, so this book's image of the line comes back to us about twenty years later.

David Cole is a Brown student with ADHD and a friend of Mooney's. The sources I could find say nothing more about him than this; I will not say more either.

The two of them transferred to Brown in September 1997. Brown's 1998 news bulletin introduces them both as juniors, Mooney 21 and Cole 23. The same bulletin also says the book was being written at the time. So this is not a book by two experts looking back years later; it is a book by two students still at university who had just finished the transition. That is both the book's strength and its limit.

The starting idea

The publisher's description states the book's thesis clearly: schools measure intelligence by narrow standards, standardize it, and label students who learn differently as lazy or failures. The book calls on the reader to take ownership of their own education, to look at their past and present, and to use study skills and campus resources on their own terms. The quotation on Barnes & Noble ties this thesis to the image in the title: schools and teachers draw lines, and those lines decide who counts as successful.

This framework feels familiar to me, because it is a perfect example of what I described in the piece on the not living up to potential label on the site: the sentence that blames the gap between capacity and outcome on a lack of effort. Mooney and Cole write as two people who grew up with these labels, and they are presented that way in the descriptions too: two students who struggled at school and then graduated successfully from Brown.

The book's genre comes from here too. Part of it is memoir, part of it is manual. Mixed books like this carry a strange risk: if the memoir part runs too long, the study guide falls into the background; if the guide part dominates, the memoir looks like decoration. Looking at the page counts, I see that the book tips the balance in the second direction; the memoir part is about sixty pages, the study skills part a hundred and sixty.

Moving around inside the book

The book has three parts, and even the distribution of pages tells something on its own. The introduction is titled "A Naked Introduction" and is ten pages. Then comes the memoir part of about sixty pages, followed by the study skills part of a hundred and sixty pages, and at the very end a closing section of thirty-odd pages.

Part one. In retailer listings it appears as "Devian Minds". The final t seems to be missing, but I am leaving it as it is in the listing. It consists of three chapters. "Jonathan" is twenty-two pages, "David" ten pages. The third is "Institutionalized", twenty-six pages. One piece discussing the book describes this chapter as the place where the authors begin to read their own experiences as products of the education system's skewed priorities. The most important pages of the book, I think, must be here: before giving strategies, it explains why they needed strategies.

Part two, "Schooled". This is the body of the book, six chapters. "Taking Notes Further" is twenty-seven pages. "Dominate Discussion" is seventeen pages. "Less Reading, More A's" is twenty-six pages. "Writing, Writing, Writing" is the longest chapter in the book at thirty-six pages. "Cram Like a Pro" is twenty-eight, "Beating the Exam Game" twenty-six pages.

For the note-taking chapter, notes and summaries prepared by third parties mention these details: a separate notebook or folder for each class, two-column Cornell-style notes, reading the syllabus to know what will be covered before going into class. In the discussion chapter, what stands out is first saying what you understood and then asking about what you did not: the "I understand x but I don't understand y" pattern, going back to the other person by saying "I heard you say this", and a three-sentence reply ending in a short summary, a claim and a question. The rationale for the chapter is written down too: the effect of participation on grade point average. There is a similar description for "Less Reading, More A's": every reading should have a purpose, the way of reading should be chosen according to that purpose, and the syllabus and what is discussed in class show where the reading fits. All of this information is secondhand; I am passing on not the book's own sentences but the framework they summarize.

Let me be honest: I could not verify the content of the writing, cramming and exam chapters. All I have are their titles and page counts. The fact that the writing chapter is the longest in the book says something, but I do not know what it says, so I will not write about it.

Part three, "Beyond Beating the System". The first chapter is "Living a Life Less Ordinary", nineteen pages. The book closes with "Epilogue: Project Eye-to-Eye", thirteen pages. From Brown's 1998 bulletin I learned that Eye-to-Eye began that year as a small mentoring program pairing six students at Brown with six students at a nearby elementary school. Its message, in short, was: you are not alone, you can do it. Mooney later turned it into a nationwide organization; the number of chapters it has varies from source to source.

Its strongest points

The book's first plus is its structure. First it explains why they struggled, then how they studied. This order, from memoir to technique, presents technique not as a rule but as a way of surviving. I think this is also where the book sets itself apart from similar study guides.

Second, the voice. The common point in published reviews is humor and a confidence that comes from the inside. One review on the website of a school in New Jersey finds the book motivating, informative and practical. Another review describes the book as part memoir, part do-it-yourself guide, and notes that it sees university not as a utopia but as a confining place.

Third, it states a hard practical truth like "participation affects your GPA" openly. This kind of honesty guides a student with ADHD in a place where nobody has put the rule into writing.

Weak points and criticisms

First, the matter of evidence. This is not the product of research; it rests on the experience of two people. I have not seen a study testing the strategies the book proposes. As I showed in the piece on taking notes with ADHD on the site, the research on note-taking is small and mixed; a system working for one person does not mean it will work for another.

Second, age. The book was written in 2000. Given the year of publication, you should not expect it to cover taking notes on a laptop, phone apps, audiobooks or today's digital study tools.

Third, reader reactions. On Goodreads it averages around 3.87, with close to six hundred ratings. The negative reviews gather around three things: the content is outdated, some jokes are sexual references and distracting, and some advice is questionable. The most often cited example is skipping part of the reading assignment. I also think this varies by field. In majors with a heavy reading load, such as law and philosophy, skipping the text of the statute or the source text and settling for a summary is, in my view, not safe in every class. The book may be saying this in its own context; since I could not get hold of the chapter's text, I do not know exactly what the book says, I only know that readers find it questionable.

Fourth, the tension within the book itself. The subtitle says "Educational Revolution", and the third part is called "Beyond Beating the System". But more than half the pages describe how to beat the system. These two goals can stand side by side; still, the weight of the study chapters gets ahead of the claim of revolution. This may not be a flaw, perhaps a necessity: first you survive. But the first thing that lands in the reader's hands is a toolkit, not a revolution.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

It is designed for someone with dyslexia or ADHD who is about to enter a university in the US and is asking "how can I hold my ground in this system?". It is interesting for families and teachers too, because it is a voice from the inside.

There is something for a reader in Turkey to keep in mind. The structure of rights and resources the book relies on belongs to American campuses. For the Turkish equivalent, it is better to look at the piece on exam accommodations and rights. The book also gathers two different things under one roof: learning disability and ADHD. The two are often seen together but they are separate things; I explained the difference in the piece on ADHD and learning disabilities.

Someone newly diagnosed and still in the period of shame should go to the memoir part before the strategies in the book. The strategy chapters, on the other hand, read more comfortably as a reference book for someone trying to save a single class or exam.

The job of the memoir part

It is tempting to skip the first sixty pages of the book and go straight to the note-taking chapter, especially in exam week. I think that would be a false economy. The strategies are built on top of the part that explains why you struggle. Even the title of the "Institutionalized" chapter carries a claim: the authors try to attribute the struggle not to their own shortcomings but to the institution's yardstick. Every personalization suggested in the study part, every "find your own system" sentence, draws on this starting point.

This also has a cost. Finding your own system is often the hardest part for someone with ADHD. The abundance of options the book offers is liberating for some readers, and a new kind of decision fatigue for others. I am not writing this as a flaw of the book; it is a problem study books share.

How I would read it

Instead of reading the book from start to finish, I would suggest an order like this: first the introduction and the memoir part, then the chapter for whichever single skill you are most stuck on during that period. If you are taking notes, the note-taking chapter; if you cannot speak up in class, the discussion chapter. Practice it for a week and then move on to the next. Setting up six systems at once, with ADHD, leads by the shortest route to dropping them all.

Its place on the shelf

The book neighbors two groups on the shelf. One is the shame books: You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!, the book whose title is itself a claim, the one that says you are not lazy. Mooney and Cole say the same sentence from a student's point of view.

The other is Hallowell. Since he wrote the foreword, it makes sense to think of it together with Driven to Distraction: one describes the diagnosis through a physician's eyes, this book through a student's eyes. On the site, the pieces why reading books is hard with ADHD and academic writing describe, from another angle, the two loads that the book's reading and writing chapters deal with.

Final word

It would not be wrong to buy this book to learn study methods, but I think the real thing to take from it is a direction: the label is not yours, it belongs to the system's yardstick. Methods can grow old; this framework has not.