CHAPTER TEN

Acronyms and Acrostics

Even if you’ve never sat down at a piano or picked up a clarinet, you probably know the five notes on the treble clef scale of a piece of sheet music: E G B D F. Why do you know this? Because you know that Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (or maybe Every Good Boy Does Fine), the mnemonic device created from the five letters. You also may know the notes in the spaces: F A C E, easy to remember because they spell a word.

These are two examples of the use of words to help you remember letters: acronyms and acrostics.

Acronyms

First, a word to grammarians and English majors: In the context of mnemonic devices, an acronym is any abbreviation formed from the first letter of each word in a phrase. Normally acronyms refer to actual words (like FACE) created by these abbreviations, but mnemonists stretch the meaning a little bit.

When you take the first letter of each word in a phrase and bring it together to create a simple abbreviation, you’ve created a mnemonic acronym. That first letter acts as a trigger to help you remember the word it represents.

For example, you may have learned the acronym ROY G BIV in grade school. ROY is not the father of spectrometry, but the name does deal with the spectrum: Each of the letters represents one of the colors of the rainbow, in order from top to bottom. So ROY G BIV becomes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

The range of acronyms used as memory devices is wide and deep.

• English majors use one to remember the seven coordinating conjunctions: FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
• Students have one for the five Great Lakes: HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior).
• Biologists use an acronym to remember the essential amino acids: PVT TIM HALL (phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, methionine, histidine, arginine, leucine, lysine).

Creating an acronym to help you remember a list of items is a fairly easy task. If you can’t change the order of the items to form a word, even an abbreviation can give you a device that provides a cue for each word in your list. To create an acronym, here’s what you need to do:

1. List the words or phrases you need to remember.
2. Circle the first letter of each word.
3. Write all of the first letters on one line.
4. If you do not need to remember the list sequentially, rearrange the letters until they spell a word. If the list must remain in sequence (like ROY G BIV), you now have your abbreviation.
5. Rehearse using the acronym to develop quick recall of the meaning of each initial letter, until you can retrieve all of the words without looking at the list.

Acrostics

An acrostic also takes the first letter of each word in the list you want to memorize, but to form the acrostic, you choose a different, familiar word to replace the one you need to remember, and use the chosen words to make a sentence that actually means something. This is how an unnamed musician created the sentence Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (or Every Good Boy Does Fine) from the lines on the music staff.

There may be hundreds of acrostics that help people remember standardized lists of facts. Some of the best known of these come from the world of science, where rote memorization of anatomy, periodic tables, taxonomy, and any number of other classifications is necessary before a student can work in a laboratory.

Here are some well-known examples:

• The order of taxonomy: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species
• The acrostic: Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach
• The order of the planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto (at the time)
• The acrostic: My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies
• The order of math operations: parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, add, subtract
• The acrostic: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

Create Your Own Acrostic

There’s no doubt that one of the reasons acrostics are so popular as memory devices is that they are easy to create. Here’s what you need to do:

1. List the terms, items, or words you need to remember on a sheet of paper or an erasable board.
2. Circle the first letter of each word.
3. Write the first letter of each of these words in a vertical line, with one letter on each line.
4. For each letter, choose a keyword that starts with the same letter. Write the keyword on the line with the letter.
5. As you choose your keywords, create a sentence from these words. It should be somehow memorable: funny, personal, weird, sexy, or just bizarre.
6. Rehearse the sentence until you can remember what each of the keywords stands for without looking at the board or paper.
7. If you’re memorizing something along with a team of classmates or coworkers, share the acrostic with them to help standardize it. This will increase repetition of the acrostic, thus improving its memorability.

For example, let’s create an acrostic for the periods of the Paleozoic Era, from the oldest to the most recent. Here are the words you need to remember:

Cambrian

Ordovician

Silurian

Devonian

Carboniferous

Permian

The letters you will use in creating this acrostic are: C O S D C P.

Now, create a sentence in which the words begin with these letters in order. The more funny and outrageous it is, the more memorable it will be. How about:

Cranky Octopus Scares Danish Correspondents’ Parents

Like most acrostics, it’s more of a headline than a sentence. You’re likely to remember it, however, especially if you can imagine an annoyed octopus crashing a party and frightening away a crowd of elderly people at a journalists’ dinner in Denmark.

If you were trying to memorize the six Paleozoic periods right now, your next step would be to use the first letter of each word in the sentence to quiz yourself until you can rattle off the six periods in no time. If you were studying for an exam that had this information on it, you probably would experience the mindflush that takes place after the test, when your memory quite literally flushes out all the information it doesn’t need now that the exam is over—but this one tidbit may well stay with you for much longer, because you took the time to create an acrostic that you can remember.

The Downside of Acronyms and Acrostics

The enduring quality of acronyms like ROY G BIV and acrostics like Every Good Boy Deserves Favor may make you think that acronyms and acrostics must be among the strongest memory boosters in the entire field.

Experts disagree about this, however, citing that the lack of meaningful content in acronyms designates them helpful only when using rote memorization. According to some researchers, acronyms and acrostics are fine if a person simply wants to memorize terms, but they do not contribute to comprehension of the content they represent. You may now be able to rattle off the six periods of Paleozoic history, for example, but you may not know anything about any of them—or even what Paleozoic history is.

If you remain clear on the definition of memory versus knowledge, then acronyms and acrostics may be perfectly useful tools to help you increase the number of facts and lists that you can remember in college course work, in your place of business, or at home. Rattling off the names of the bones of the hand and arm, however, does not make you a surgeon. If you want to gain knowledge about the topics in question, there’s only one route to take: Pay attention. Listen, take notes, and become an active learner.

Improving Study Habits for Maximum Recall

Every memory in your brain has a half-life, a point at which it begins to fall off dramatically if it is not reinforced with periodic review. Unlike elements in the natural world that lose their power over time, your memories can be recharged without a great deal of effort—simply by taking them out for some exercise.

One of the ways to increase your recall of information is through the process of stepped periodic review. This can involve any kind of study, whether you’re in college or learning new skills on the job, which can include using all the mnemonic devices, associations, visualization, and everything else discussed in this book—if you review the information periodically and at the right time for your memory, you will increase your long-term retention of the information.

When you’ve been studying for an hour or so, your brain takes the time to integrate what it has learned into long-term memory. Your recall at that point goes up, and you think you’ve committed this information to permanent memory. If you decide you’re home free and you close your books, however, you may be missing an opportunity to give these new memories another bit of reinforcement.

At the end of a study session, take a few minutes to review what you’ve learned in the previous hour. This will lengthen the life of that information. Then the following day, review it again. You may be surprised at how much of what you’ve learned does not come easily to mind. Once you’ve re-triggered those memories, their life actually increases. Now it might be a week before the new information begins to erode.

Come back to your notes in a week and review them again, and you will extend those memories for several weeks. If you keep doing this—coming back after a month, or two months, or six months, and reviewing the material again—you will create long-term memories that will not leave you for years to come.

Why does this work? Think about the process of rehearsing the use of any of the memory techniques discussed so far in this book. Each time you rehearse, you reach a point at which you believe you know the material well. You’ve used vivid imagery, humor, and a little outrageousness to remember all of the details of a list or a concept. Once you no longer have use for that information, however, you stop returning to it—and it disappears, receding in your memory until you can no longer recall how to access it. Your mind has performed the selective forgetting that allows you to focus on whatever task is at hand.

What if, however, you’re using that information on the job? Suddenly it becomes second nature—because you’re rehearsing that information every day. You no longer need the periodic reminders. You have internalized that information to the point that it’s something you know.