Remember Everything You Read: The Evelyn Wood 7-Day Speed Reading \& Learning Program pdfdrive com

What’s a Recall Pattern?
At the Evelyn Wood program, we prefer to call our lesson notes “recall
patterns,” because their main function is to enable you to organize and
then draw easily and efficiently on the material you’ve taken in during
study sessions.
The ability to recall is the ability to write or relate orally, in your own
words, information that you’ve gained from what you’ve read. By this
definition, then, recalling is directly tied into the process of
remembering.
The student who has a good memory, along with an ability to make an
intelligent presentation of the facts and concepts remembered, is going
to earn the highest grades. In fact, you might say that the achievements
of all honors students begin with the art of committing key information
to memory.
Two of the main elements that promote a good memory are strong
associations between different items of information and powerful
impressions made on the mind by the assigned material. Many memory
experts recommend, for example, that you link different items together
through mental pictures. Also, they may suggest that you root them in
dramatic, absurd or amusing thoughts or emotions.
Suppose you want to remember a group of unconnected items on a
shopping list. These might include catsup, lettuce, carrots, celery, toilet
paper, beets, oranges and toothpaste. Remembering these eight items
without writing them down may be chancy, especially if you have a lot
of other things on your mind. But if you link them together into an
absurd picture in your mind, remembering becomes much easier.
For example, you might picture these items as part of a funny little
“grocery man”: His body is the catsup bottle; his head is the lettuce; one
arm is a carrot; another arm is a piece of celery; his eyes are beets; his
nose is an orange; he’s on a street lined with toilet paper; and he’s riding

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a toothpaste-tube-shaped rocket ship. If you know there are ten items
and you associate them in this absurd but connected sequence, you’re
much more likely to remember all of them.
The same principles apply when you’re taking notes. There’s very little
that’s memorable about writing sentence after sentence in a notebook.
But if you structure your notes into a logically connected, visually
impressive pattern on the paper, you’re much more likely to recall later
what you’ve written.