This week I wanted to talk about something a little different.  It still has to do with writing (obviously), but I wanted to talk about how writing effects our memory.  I was thinking about this last week because in Psychology we were discussing aspects of memory and how we learn to remember things.  For example, I’m sure most of you have learned the sentence, “My very educated mother just served us noodles,” or “My very elderly mother just sat on Uncle Ned” or something along those lines.  If you’re drawing a blank, these are sentences a lot of grade school teachers use to help children remember the names of the planets in order (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune).  I recently heard some of my friends in an Astrology class using these sentences to study for their test.  I had a test coming up where I needed to remember where consonant sounds are produced in the mouth (which is a LOT of memorization) so I decided to try writing my own sentences to remember where the consonant sounds were produced.

Needless to say, this technique made it much easier to study the material and I wound up memorizing more than I needed to.  I’m sure you’ve all had to do something similar for a test where you’ve written a sentence or something else to help you remember something.  This is actually a legitimate technique called “mnemonics.” The term applies to more than just writing sentences to improve memory.  It’s actually an umbrella term for any development of any technique to help the memory.

This made me wonder: why does writing improve memory?  We’ve all heard teachers tell us to take handwritten notes and make our own memory devices.  However, as someone who writes and who is interested in psychology, I decided to look into it.  There’s actually a lot of science behind it, but I’ll try and summarize it into a few main points.

Basically, what mnemonics do is help you cross-reference the information you have learned by using the other parts of your brain.  The writing helps you organize your thoughts in order to retrieve it later when you need it. It also helps make the material more meaningful for you, which makes it a great technique to use if you don’t care about the subject material.

Anyways, I hope some of you found this interesting.  I think looking at how writing effects memory would be really fascinating to look into further, and if you have heard of this technique before I’d be curious to hear if it’s something that works for you!