For a long time, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to efficiently memorize poetry (including capitalization and punctuation, since this is what is required at the US memory championships).

I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the best way to do it is to have pre-memorized images for common words.  Words like the, a, an, but, or, so, etc.  Also, if there is a period or a capital letter, one should have pre-set images for that as well, interacting with the word.

The word itself can actually be an image of whatever the word is, if it is a noun.  Verbs and non-concrete nouns could be trickier.  For example, how would you try to memorize “fearful”?  How would you go from “fear” to “afraid” to “fearful”.  I guess I would try to break down the word further.  There is both “fear” and “ful”.  ”Ful” –> “full”, so perhaps a bunch of screaming kids afraid of being forced by their mothers to eat more because they are already so full.  They’re so full they’re puking up everywhere around the room while screaming how fearful they are.  You get the picture, hopefully.  Heh.

So I think right now the best way to do it is would be to have a one locus for each word, including punctuation and grammar.  By merit of having nothing else in the locus, that would mean a space, which makes intuitive sense.

I guess for words like a and an those could be including with a word’s locus, too.

Interesting…more later.