What Is a Crib Sheet?

Feb 13, 2020

A crib sheet is usually known as a cheat sheet or a writer’s style guide. It comes in various formats and designs. Generally, a crib sheet is any document that serves as a guide or manual that writers follow to comply with the standards and protocols of a particular industry or work.

It has similar characteristics with a fact sheet. However, compared to a fact sheet and tracking sheet, which are mostly professionally and formally written, crib sheets are considered as an informal document. It makes a complex topic or procedure easy to understand, familiarize and comprehend.

Uses of Crib Sheets

To understand the dynamics of crib sheets, below are the specific fields that uses crib sheets:

• School works – Both students and teachers can benefit from the legitimate use of crib sheets. For students, specifically, it can serve as their study guides or memory aid. Coming up with a crib sheet is a strategy in itself. For teachers, they can use the crib sheet in as a guide in conducting classes. They can include the topic points in the crib sheet templates in Excel and make some necessary updates from if needed.

• Writers – For writers, may it be for a magazine, journal, or website, crib sheets can help them maintain the quality and consistency in their outputs. For industries that are aiming for higher productivity, crib sheets are their go sheet templates. Giving and writing instructions and guidelines is made easy and convenient with the use of crib sheets.

For other professionals, they can make use of crib sheets if ever they are bombarded with routinary tasks that involves complex guidelines and tools. Cheat sheets can help them simplify their tasks in order to manage them efficiently and comprehensively.

How to Develop a Student Crib Sheet?

Crib sheets are commonly known as cheat sheets. To supplement the ideas and strategies provided by printable sheet templates, here are some key points that students may consider in crafting a crib sheet:

Prepare a separate crib sheet for a particular subject matter—this is just a general rule. However, if you’re comfortable with integrating all subjects in one crib, it is still possible. Just choose the option that is convenient for you.

If you’re dealing with subjects that involve calculations such as mathematics and engineering, consolidating all the relevant formulas is highly suggested. To add, you can also put reminders, rules in solving particular problems, conceptual definitions and more. To make your work more convenient, you can even use sheet templates in Word. All you need to do is to customize and format them to suit your contexts.

For other fields such as general education, you add concepts in your crib sheet that relates to theories, principles, relevant and iconic historical figures, definition of relevant terms, significant dates and events, and many more.

And lastly, you can also add sample problems and test questions in your crib sheet to test your knowledge about a certain subject. As much as possible, you need to update the contents of your chosen sheet templates to increase the credibility of the information provided.