One to two days before the test, prepareand reinforcean appropriate Power List covering the key points of the material. What’s a Power List? It’s the natural culmination of the acronym, replacement/exaggeration and numeric sounds techniques you learned in the previous chapter. It can be expanded or contracted as you see fit, and can accommodate whatever materials you feel are important to review. Developing a Power List is not a substitute for studying your material, but a convenient way to memorize key points that you can later reconstructon paper, if that’s an optionduring the test.
If you have the three strategies from the previous chapter down, and if you’ve effectively highlighted your written text and taken good notes, you’re ready to supercharge your study and memorization efforts. Here’s how:
Develop an acronym appropriate to the material you’ve been studying. In the case of the misdeeds that occurred within the Grant administration, you’d probably want one that reminds you of Grant himself and of each of the five main scandals:
1. Black Friday
2. Credit Mobilier Affair
3. Delinquent tax collection abuse
4. Whiskey Ring
5. Belknap Bribery
Take a look at this acronym:
Redskins (football team)
Developing an acronym along these lines is the first step in building your Power List. (Please note, however, that the acronym itself is a powerful memory tool, and you should certainly feel free to use something along the lines of the one we’ve just constructed if you feel uncomfortable working with the Power List techniques you’re about to learn.)
Now, you’ll have to take my word for the fact that I chose the word “cigar” for two reasons: because it reminded me of President Grant, and because it has five letters, corresponding in number to the five main points in the material. we just reviewed. As far as content goes, the following connections to the five main points of the passage were the esult of a little inspired manipulation with words. Similarly on-target associations could have been developed from just about any word that met the initial criteria.
The acronym you develop is not supposed to do the entire job. It is simply to remind you of the key points in your condensed notes.
Form a memory chain from each word in your acronym.
Let’s look at those condensed notes once again, with the initial ideas of our acronym inserted appropriately:
Grant: 5 scandals [CIGAR]
G not drctly tied to any crms
1. Black Friday [CALENDAR]
a. Fisk, Gould, specultrs: aimed t crnr gold mkt. Hoped t prvnt govt fm “dmpng” gold onto mkt
b. Encrgd prcption G admin spprted maneuvers
c. G finally figured out what was up; ordered Treasry to sll $4m in gold
d. 9/24/1869 (Blk Frdy), svre economic shck rslts .
here i end this series, see you soon.
Vivek, “the visionary”