My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos. What is the significance of this sentence? Focus on the first letter of each word, and ask yourself if the sequence sounds familiar: M V E M J S U N. Each letter represents one of the eight planets, in order from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The sentence is called a mnemonic device; in this case, it is an acrostic in which the first letter of each word represents an item to be remembered. Mnemonic devices are named for the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, and acrostics are just one of several mnemonic methods that help people remember strings of information. If you need to memorize a grocery list, for example, you can design an acronym for it: bread, eggs, avocado, milk = BEAM. Or you could compose a rhyme: I despise arising from bed, but I’ll do it for eggs and bread.
If you struggle to recall acronyms and rhymes, you might instead envision your list via mental imagery. Some mnemonics link items together in narrative fashion—a hot sidewalk fries an egg(eggs), which goes into a sandwich(bread), which makes you
crave a beverage(milk). Linking, while useful for simple situations, could also prompt you to remember something more complex, such as the difference between the terrestrial planets and the gas giants.
Another visual method, which comes from the Greeks and Romans, utilizes a location, such as a house, as the setting for a mnemonic device. For this type of mnemonic, you would associate each room—and perhaps even the decor—with one item to be remembered. As you mentally entered each room, the images or words associated with that room would surface. In any situation that requires memorization, a mnemonic can spell the difference between success and disaster.
Part 1
1. What is the key idea or message of this article?
2. What are two details that support your analysis of the key idea or message?
3. What can you infer about mnemonics and schoolwork based on the article?
4. What evidence from the article and from your background knowledge can you cite to support your inference?