SECTION E – TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR MEMORY
Repetition
Go over information at least three times. Check back over it often.
Personalising information
Relate what you learn to yourself (For example in what way does it
affect you? Does it remind you of someone you know or somewhere
you’ve been?)
Visualization and Association
Link what you need to remember to something you already know. Most
people remember images better than spoken or written information.
For example, I can easily imagine the different houses that I have lived
in during my life, even though I might have a hard time remembering all
the addresses and phone numbers.
An Example – (The Daffodils – Poem by William Wordsworth)
You might find it easier to remember the main points of this poem by
creating a picture for it in your mind and imaging yourself in the shoes
of the author.
Story / Linking Technique
As the name suggests it links each item in the form of story. It also
relies on making a clear story that not only helps you remember each of
the items, but also the order in which they appear. The following
example tells us a story to help remember the order of planets (distance
from the sun).
As the sun gets hotter and hotter MERCURY inside the
thermometer rises as it expands with the heat. Eventually the
mercury gets so hot that it explodes out of the end of the
thermometer. These mercury droplets fall on to VENUS, the
goddess of love. To get away from droplets of mercury, Venus
starts digging a hole in the ground and as she does, she piles up a
huge mound of brown EARTH. As she digs away furiously the pile
of earth gets bigger and upsets the next door neighbour. An
angry face appears over the fence and starts shouting because the
noise has interrupted him eating his huge MARS bar. Outraged,
he throws his mars bar away but unfortunately it hits a huge
muscular fellow called JUPITER, who happened to be walking by.
As Jupiter walks towards the commotion, on his t-shirt are the
letters s u n that stands for SATURN, URANUS and NEPTUNE.
He was followed by his dog called PLUTO.
Mnemonics
Any trick to help you remember is a mnemonic (pronounced nem-on-ic).
Many mnemonics also take the form of acronyms. To recall the spelling
of the word mnemonic, say, you could memorise the following phrase:
Monkey Nut Eating Means Old Nutshells In Carpet.
Taking the initial letters of each word spells out MNEMONIC.
Spelling Acronyms
The following mnemonics are sentences or phrases in which the initial
letters of the words spell out a word which many people find rather
tricky to spell.
BECAUSE
Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants
ARITHMETIC
A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream
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GEOGRAPHY
General Eisenhower's Oldest Girl Rode A Pony Home Yesterday
RHYTHM
Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move
NECESSARY
Not Every Cat Eats Sardines (Some Are Really Yummy)
ARGUMENT
A Rude Girl Undresses; My Eyes Need Taping!
OCEAN
Only Cats' Eyes Are Narrow
And a trick to remember how to spell POTASSIUM: just remember one
tea, two sugars. You can use a similar aide memoire to prevent
confusion between DESERTS (like the Sahara) and DESSERTS (like
Tiramisu) by remembering that the sweet one has two sugars.
There is a closely related mnemonic technique that also uses the
initial letters of a phrase. This time they do not spell out a word, but
each initial corresponds to a word beginning with the same letter. Such
mnemonics are generally used to memorise the order of a list of items.
For example, most people are familiar with the names of the planets in
the Solar System: Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Pluto, Saturn,
Uranus, and Venus. Far fewer though could confidently tell you the order
of these planets (in average distance from the Sun). However, with a
simple mnemonic such as the one below, recalling this can be easier:
My Very Easy Method: Just Set Up Nine Planets.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
You need to be careful if a letter is repeated. In the above example
there are two M’s. Here are some more examples.
Order of colours in the rainbow, or visual spectrum:
(Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet)
Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.
Order of taxonomy in biology:
(Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species)
Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach.
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One common mnemonic is to use the first letter of each keyword to
make a new ‘word’ that sums up the whole subject. It doesn’t matter if
the letters don’t make a real word.
SKILL is a mnemonic for the Excretory Organs of the Body—Skin,
Kidneys, Intestines, Liver, and Lungs. Notice that if you take the
first letter of each excretory organ in the order shown, you get the word
SKILL.
Use Mind maps –Mind maps show information in a way that your mind
may find easy to remember and quick to read (see note taking section).
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