Letter Technique : In order to employ the first letter technique, you need to pick up the first letter of each word you want to remember and arrange them to form another word or a sentence. For example, colours of a rainbow are remembered in this way (VIBGYOR- that stands for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red). Mnemonic strategies for memory enhancement are too simplistic and perhaps underestimate complexities of memory tasks and difficulties people experience while memorising. In place of mnemonics, a more comprehensive approach to memory improvement has been suggested by many psychologists.
In such an approach, emphasis is laid on applying knowledge about memory processes to the task of memory improvement. Let us examine some of these suggestions. It is suggested that one must : (a) Engage in Deep Level Processing : If you want to memorise any information well, engage in deep level processing. Craik and Lockhart have demonstrated that processing information in terms of meaning that they convey leads to better memory as compared to attending to their surface features.
Deep processing would involve asking as many questions related to the information as possible, considering its meaning and examining its relationships to the facts you already know. In this way, the new information will become a part of your existing knowledge framework and the chances that it will be remembered are increased. (b) Minimise Interference : Interference, as we have read, is a major cause of forgetting and therefore you should try to avoid it as much as possible. You know that maximum interference is caused when very similar materials are learned in a sequence.
Avoid this. Arrange your study in such a way that you do not learn similar subjects one after the other. Instead, pick up some other subject unrelated to the previous one. If that is not possible, distribute your learning/practice.
This means giving yourself intermittent rest periods while studying to minimise interference.