![]() ![]() I visualised Nietzsche sitting on the end of my bed.Īnd he’s not just sitting on my bed, Nietzsche is trembling. So I went to a specific part of my room – the part I designated as the beginning – my bed. The one I wanted to use was:Īn overpowering feeling of unity, which leads back to the heart of nature. I had quite a few different Nietzsche quotes so I needed something to jog my memory about which one I was going to use. So my essay began with a quote from Nietzsche. What I did next was to take the essay I wanted to memorise and I allocated different points in the essay to different areas of the room. There was the bed, the bedside table, the drawers, the closet, the windowsill, the bookshelf, the desk, the entrance way, the adjacent bathroom, the sink, the toilet, and the shower. ![]() (Stephen Fry)Īnyway, so I used my dorm room to remember facts about my Shakespeare and mythology essay. All my ducks were in a row when I walked into the examination hall and I had no more than point their beaks at the question. I did, of course, no such vulgar thing as discuss. ‘Shakespeare outgrew his comedies.’ ‘Shakespeare put his talent into his comedies and his genius into his tragedies.’ ‘Tragedies are adolescent, comedies are adult.’ ‘Shakespeare cares about gender, but not about sex.’ Discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss. ‘King Lear’ is Shakespeare’s only likeable tragic hero’: Discuss. ‘Shakespeare’s real voice is in his comedies’: Discuss. The point is that you can trot this essay out no matter what the question. Let’s say, in simple terms, that my essay proposes that Shakespeare’s comedies, even the ‘Festive’ ones, play with being tragedies while his tragedies play with being comedies. It only takes a paragraph at the top to twist the question such that your essay answers it. Quick aside on the subject of knowing what you are going to write before you enter the exam hall: Stephen Fry expounds upon this idea and the reasoning for implementing it in his superb autobiography: This is where you’re going to hang the facts you need to remember for easy access.įor my finals at Oxford, I designated many different places for different essays.įor example, I knew exactly what I was going to write about when it came to Shakespeare and mythology, so I hung the facts I would need for that work in one room: my dorm room. It could be your house and all of the rooms contained within.Īs long as you know the place well and you can visualise it, it’s suitable.It could be your walking route to school and all the little stops and spots along the way.What you do is take a place that you know extremely well. The memory palace takes advantage of the fact that our spatial memories ( our abilities to remember physical locations) is far superior to other forms of remembering, such as rote memorisation. When you see feats of memory involving memorising long lists or lengthy blocks of information ( or the famous card deck memorisation trick), they are usually made possible by this technique. Today, many memory champions attribute much of their success to this technique. This technique was known in the ancient world as the method of loci and many great Roman and Greek orators applied this method to memorise long rhetorical speeches. But I still remember the essays I wrote on everything from mythology in Shakespeare’s romances to satiric court poetry of the restoration era… How?īecause I structured my essays according to an ancient mnemonic device know as the memory palace. Many years after my final exams at Oxford, I can still remember the essays I wrote.
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