BackWord Memorization Skills

Learning vast amounts of material that can be regurgitated on an exam is vitally important for most of the core classes. Sure, you may never see those questions again, but for the four times each semester that you have your exams, you’ll be required to pump out facts about the various elements (e.g. criminal law), standards of review (e.g. constitutional law), rules (e.g. property), or other information. Law school is even worse for requiring students to memorize verbatim lots of information that they’ll never use again. Simply put, the key to success in most classes is to memorize everything you can. Memorization is important in certain law classes because so much of the material is fact-based.

I’m sure that when you were younger, you were required to memorize Shakespearean monologues or the capitals of U.S. states. You probably read over each sentence again and again until you could perfect Romeo’s speeches. The good news is that you have already seen how much material you can memorize. The bad news is that you’ve been doing it all wrong. The correct way to go about memorizing is by reading the words backwards. Here’s a demonstration. Look at this number:

75713650058

Cover up everything with a sheet of paper except the last digit, 8. Now slowly say, “eight,” aloud three times. Next, slide the paper over one digit and slowly say, “five-eight,” three times. Again, slide the paper over to reveal 058 and say, “zero-five-eight.” Continue the exercise all the way until the first number. Don’t try to get ahead of yourself by jumping two to three numbers at a time. Just continue working one number after another until you’ve finished. Once you’re done, test your new memorization skills by covering up everything once again and then saying the number aloud.

Are you impressed yet? Go ahead and try memorizing other random things just to get a feel for the backwards memorization technique. Practice on song lyrics and speeches. Just cover up everything but the last word and then work your way back to the beginning. For longer pieces of text, you may want to try memorizing only one paragraph at a time. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to retain large volumes of material in a short amount of time. You can impress your friends by showing them that you can memorize the serial numbers on dollar bills within seconds of staring at the paper. This technique is not only useful for learning long numbers and speeches, but can easily be applied to law as well.

The key is to make sure that you have a particular piece fully committed to memory before trying the next item. For the number example above, don’t move to 50058 if you cannot say, “0058,” without effort. If you want to learn the theory behind this memorization trick, read Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog! or you could go as far as taking behavioral and cognitive psychology courses.

As a final, cautionary note, stay away from flash cards. They are a waste of time to produce. Yes, some people do learn from them, but keep in mind that the time spent writing flash cards could be better spent working on memorizing the material. By the time your friends are done writing their cards, you’ll be finished studying if you follow the method I described here. If you don’t like the backwards memorization technique that I’ve described, the book Learn to Remember by Dominic O’Brien (ISBN: 0811827151) details methods that use your imagination to create either sequential movies or static pictures of associations to help you remember things.