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Essay Key Points and Book Prompts

What if a section of a book has subsections? It would be nice to recall the sections in sequence but also to be able to drill down into one of those sections and recall its list of subsection headings - and then to recall the key prompts of the subsection's major paragraphs.

The main sections sequence could be travelled across by using an acrostic. Each word of the acrostic sentence is cryptically a spelling prompt regarding each section of the book. If there are many sections then more than one acrostic sentence would need to be memorised.

An alternative to the acrostic way of remembering sections is to tell a story where the people or objects or locations in the story are cryptic prompts regarding the sections of the book. The sequence of the story matches the sequence in which the sections of the book are supposed to be listed. This is called a Linked List.

There may be a lot of fuzziness about which words or story images are allowed to represent sections of the book. For instance, if Photosynthesis is a section heading then maybe an image of a camera or the word 'Camera' could be in the story or acrostic: a camera takes photos - and photo sounds a bit like Photosynthesis.

That camera image would then need its own sub-list of the subsections of the Photosynthesis chapter. So you could start off a new story which begins with a camera and then each item in the story sequence is a cryptic prompt to the next subsection heading in the list. Or you could design an acrostic which seems to start off talking about cameras but the start of each word is cleverly a prompt for each subsection. Again, a lot of fuzziness can be used.

At any point, you could substitute the use of a Linked List or Acrostic with a portion of the BLOKES System. You could learn rote that a particular list of subsections is covered by the items stored at locations 9 to 15 in the BLOKES System.

Going deeper into the drill-down of the book, you reach the major keywords of the subsection. They too could be memorised as acrostics or as linked list stories or as a sequence within the BLOKES System of peg locations.

So, some of the worry in an exam about remembering a tree structure of headings or remembering a list of essay points could be lessened by using quite reliable memory techniques.

The BLOKES System would get filled up fast. After the exam, the BLOKES System could be used to memorise a new set of facts and normal memory would forget quite sonn the original set of items which you were storing at the BLOKES System locations.

The weakness here is that the BLOKES System only holds 60 peg locations at which to visualise your essay points. So, a really powerful memory system would be one which allows you to store your knowledge at significantly more mental locations - which can be brought to mind easily in sequence.