A Justification Of Memorization

Memorizing material is an unfortunate necessity in almost any field. A professor can expose you to material in class, but the professor simply cannot memorize things for you. Although memorizing material is never lots of fun, it can be an essential support to your work. Once you have memorized certain basic facts, you have freed up a lot of time that you would have spent checking those facts each time you needed them.

General Guidelines

• In general, memorization is done effectively using repetition at increased intervals.
• Let’s say you want to memorize 25 new words.
• Put the facts somewhere where you can have easy access to them (on note cards, on a specific page of a notebook, etc.).
• Go over the facts until you know them. (You should be able, for example, to look at a word and provide the definition when the written-out definition is covered. You should also be able to cover the word itself, look at the definition and provide the word.)
• Once you have learned the 25 words, put them aside for 2-3 hours. Come back to them and go through them. You may have forgotten 3 or 4. If so, relearn them and go through the whole list until they are all correct.
• Put the list aside again. Come back to the list for a quick review after 6-8 hours. Return to it a day later, then 3 days later, then once a week. Each time you return, the number of forgotten items should get smaller and the amount of time you will need to spend re-learning material will get shorter.
• Use memorization tricks for initial learning. There are several tricks that people use to memorize facts. Here are a few of the most common. Try them all out and use the ones that seem to work best for you. Never assume that because a certain memorization method does not work for learning vocabulary, that it will not work for learning something else.
• For memorizing a list of items that all go together, try either making a word out of the first letter of each word or making a sentence out of that first letter of each word you hope to memorize.
• Example: At any given moment a child is four ages: an emotional age, a physical age (in body maturation), an intellectual age and a chronological age. One way to help memorize this is to associate the word EPIC (Emotional, Physical, Intellectual, Chronological) with the age of a child.
• Example: Many people remember the notes in the spaces of the treble clef by the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”
• Some people find writing something out a good way of memorizing since it involves senses other than just sight. You can also help anchor an idea in your mind by speaking the information out loud, thus using hearing as well as sight. Always involve as many senses as possible in learning (you can easily anchor facts to sight, sound or movement [by writing or gesturing]).
• A third excellent trick to aid memorization is subordination of ideas. When you are trying to learn a group of facts, spend some time thinking about the ways in which these facts relate to each other, what they may have in common or how some facts can be a subset of other facts. (In other words, learn material in outline form when you can.)
• Example: If you were trying to learn a list of 35 musical groups, you would be able to do so more easily if you recognized that you were dealing with 7 artists each from country, rock, jazz, pop, and rap performers. It is easier to remember 5 styles of music with 7 representatives for each style than it is to remember 35 performers listed in random order
• Exercise regularly. Remember, memory functions like a mental muscle; in other words, it behaves like every other muscle in your body. The less you use it, the more it atrophies. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes and the more efficiently it works.
• If you find that you are currently very poor at memorization, it does not mean that you have no capacity to remember; it simply means that this particular mental capacity is out of shape. Memory can be exercised regularly throughout the day.
• You can memorize while you drive by learning street names, license place numbers, or other trivia.
• Practice learning and remembering the names of people you meet, the phone numbers people give you, etc.
• No one but you can put yourself on a mental muscle exercise program.