Mnemonics using Organisation

A second family of mnemonic techniques works not through imagery but through organisation — imposing a deliberate structure on the material to be remembered. Such techniques are effective because the framework a person builds while organising the material also makes the later task of retrieval considerably easier. Two techniques of this kind are chunking and the first letter technique.

Chunking, already introduced as one of the control processes that expands the capacity of short-term memory, works by combining several smaller units into larger, meaningful chunks. Creating effective chunks depends on discovering some organising principle that can link the smaller units together in a sensible way. Because of this, chunking serves a dual role — it is a control mechanism that increases the effective capacity of short-term memory, and it is also, in its own right, a genuine technique for improving memory more broadly. …