Draw a Picture

Drawing a simple picture with some writing around it can be a good way to memorise information.

Unlike the linked list method or the loci method, there is little encoding happening: what you see is what you get.

As an example, for me to try to memorise German noun endings which are typical in feminine gender words, I can draw a woman in the centre of a piece of paer; and write the noun endings all spaced out around that main picture.

If you draw a lot of page pictures then you don't want them to be samey. A highlighter pen's effect becomes less powerful if several items on several pages have highlighting. If every picture is a spider diagram with keyword points stemming out radially from the page centre then that is less memorable than one or two picture pages being like that.

What I like about the feminine noun endings picture is that I can leave it out on a table. When I am using the table, I can have a quick glance at the picture and properly observe it. So it is gradually getting memorised without inconvenience.

It can be hard to be visual on the page. Some things are unknown - like someone in history who has not much portrait art preserving their appearance; but you can choose a tv celebrity and make the effort to designate that the celebrity equates to the person in history. Or you might use one of the people images from this course to represent the person without a face.

Or you could choose something that is easy to draw as the replacement of something that is hard to draw - particularly if the concepts have a similar sound or a similar spelling (in part). A prion could be pictured as a prism just because they both have 'pri' at the start of the spelling.

The noisier the page becomes, the less the visual effect jumps out at your memory, in my opinion; but if you have crammed a lot on to a picture page then, if you revisit it often, that should compensate for that, presumably. I think that if there is that much detail to collect together then loci recall would work better - but that's just what I think works for me.

Like with other revision, it is not good to look at a picture and say, "Yes, I've seen that before for sure - I know all that". It is good to try to recall features of the drawing before looking at the picture; and then to look at the picture and notice what you missed out and what you got wrong.

Catalogue the Pictures

One of the articles in this course is about having an image to represent any letter pair like AA, AB, AC, XX, YY, ZY, ZZ. Imagine a law case called Caldwell Versus Solomon. An image for representing CS [Caldwell : Solomon might be a cos lettuce, for example. As context, when you learn a letter pair image system, you have one an only one image that will mean CS within that system; so 'cos lettuce' is something studied and learned before studying Law.

And although CS might mean another law case such as Curtis versus Solomon [CS], you would know your revision notes well enough to know that CS means Caldwell : Solomon in this situation.

And consider that you might have learned a sequence of 100s of loci places at which to store your revision notes in sequence. Law cases which tend to be reeled off in sequence in an essay (such as cases relevant to the topic of 'recklessness') can be stored at loci visual scenes and thus recalled in sequential order. A cos lettuce at one of those places means CS which means Caldwell Vs Solomon. And you can mentally jump from that prompt to your mental recall of a picture that is all about that Caldwell legal case. That page drawing could have a cartoon of the basic story behind the case; plus keywords occurring around the picture.

So not only can you memorise page pictures but you can catalogue them for recall in an exam situation.