At primary school, I bet you learnt the order of the planets by saying: My Very Educated Mum Just Served Us Noodles.
Did you picture Mrs Gren to remember the features of living organisms for GCSE Biology?
What about the rhyme: “I before E except after C, only when it rhymes with bee”?
And to spell ‘BECAUSE’, I bet you remember being taught the phrase: ‘Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants’.
In all of these methods, your teacher was helping you to memorise tricky facts and spellings. They put an extra layer of meaning on top, so it was easier to remember the facts and spellings.
This is called MNEMONICS, and these strategies don’t just work for children.
They’re strategies for life!
In fact, “memory athletes” (people who participate in memory championships!) can rapidly learn and retain the most amazing amount of information…and many of these athletes give credit to mnemonics for their success.
Munkshur Narmandakh used mnemonics to remember over 6,000 binary digits in only 30 minutes! Alex Mullen, who won three world memory championships using mnemonics, memorised more than 3,000 decimal digits in an hour and the order of a deck of playing cards in under 20 seconds (https://mullenmemory.com).
The importance of mnemonics in learning has also been shown in the world of medicine!
In 2010, a study[i] showed that 101 physicians, physician’s assistants, registered nurses, and paramedics from Pennsylvania used 114 different mnemonic acronyms to remember crucial information.
45% of them listed at least one mnemonic acronym that could be considered bizarre.
This is the Von Restorff effect or 'bizarreness effect' (Worthen & Deschamps, 2008)[ii]. It’s a proven theory that the more bizarre something is, and the more something stands out, the more likely you are to focus on it…remember it…and therefore, commit it to memory.
So, mixing this with mnemonics can make the power of mnemonics limitless!
I’ll explain…
When we’re working on a project, there’s always those tricky words that cause us to stop and say, "Does that word need an O or E?"
So, another mnemonic memory aid to help you remember a spelling is to create a BIZARRE, funny phrase and picture in your head.
Look at the word you’re trying to learn and create a bizarre picture to help you to commit the spelling into your memory: you’ll see the picture in your head, and PING! The correct spelling pops up because you thought of the bizarre picture and phrase.
Here are some pictures to imagine…
To spell “necessary,” think of ONE Collar and TWO Shoes.
For, “separate,” remember there’s A RAT in there.
For the spelling of “accommodate”, picture a two-car garage that can accommodate TWO Cars and TWO Motorbikes!
To remember the difference between “desert” and “dessert”, try picturing a sweet dessert that has TWO Sugars in it”!
You may be thinking, “I know those spellings already,” but there will always be a few words that regularly trip us up because spelling isn’t always easy.
You may even be thinking, “It’s ok. I use spellchecker,” but ‘spellchecker’ won’t always save you. It might not let you know that you’ve used the wrong word because you weren’t sure of the spelling:
And yet it’s crucial to be accurate for the clients you’re writing for.
In fact, being accurate, can be ‘make or break’ for your clients – if you haven’t taken the time and effort to make sure your content is accurate, how do your potential clients know you’ll take the time and effort with them?
They might think, “Will they treat me with the same lack of attention?”
It can make your client lose confidence in what you will deliver for them.
So, why not try creating your own bizarre MNEMONICS to help you commit those difficult spellings to memory?
You never know, it could be the difference between winning and losing your next contract.
[i] Bortle, C.D. (2010) The role of mnemonic acronyms in clinical emergency medicine
[ii] Worthen, J. & Deschamps, J.D. (2008) Humour mediates the facilitative effect of bizarreness in delayed recall.
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