Mnemonics

Mnemonics (pronounced “ne MON iks”) are different methods or tricks to help with remembering information. Mnemonics tend to fall into four basic categories:

  1. Acronyms. Acronyms are new words created from the first letters of a list or group of words you are trying to remember. For example, a mnemonic acronym for the Great Lakes is HOMES, which stands for Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.
  2. Acrostics. An acrostic is a verse in which certain letters of each word or line form a message. Many students are taught the following to remember planets: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).
  3. Rhymes or songs. Do you remember learning “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November. / All the rest have thirty-one, / Excepting February alone. / It has twenty-eight days’ time, / But in leap years twenty-nine”? If so, you were using a mnemonic rhyming technique to remember the number of days in each month.
  4. Visualization. You can use visualization to connect a word or concept with a visual image. The more ridiculous the image, the more likely you are to remember the word or concept. For example, if you want to remember the name of George Washington, you may think of a person you know by the name of George. You should then picture that person washing a ton of dishes. Now every time you think of the first president of the United States, you see George washing a ton of dishes.3

Mnemonics provide a way of organizing material, a sort of mental filing system. They probably aren’t needed if what you are studying is logical and organized, but they can be really useful when material doesn’t have a pattern of its own. Although using mnemonics can be helpful in remembering the information, it takes time to think up rhymes, associations, or visual images which have limited use when you need to analyze or explain the material.