Study Tip: Acronyms and Mnemonics

Make up acronyms when you are learning lists of words

Acronyms and mnemonics are some of the quickest, easiest ways to remember new terms. They get words stuck in your head just like an annoying song would. So, my tip for this week is to make acronyms and mnemonics for anything you're finding harder than usual to remember or anything you want to make a bit more fun.

Acronyms are short and sweet, consisting only of the first letters of the words you need to remember. This works best if the letters can be rearranged to form an actual word, or something that can be pronounced like a word. For example:

PEE is used when remembering how to write answers to English questions

make your Point
use a quote or Example
Explain how that relates to your point

Mnemonics can take each of the first letters, and make an easy to remember sentence out of words beginning with those letters. It's great if the sentence relates to the topic you're trying to remember, but often that's just too hard to come up with. For Example:

I Sure Could Use Insurance is one I came up with to remember the 5 principals of insurance

Indemnity
Subrogation
Contribution
Utmost good faith
Insurable interest

In Irish, we were taught this phrase to remember what letters are used as urus:

My Brother

Got Caught

Not Doing

Dishes Tonight

Nobody Get's

Blueberry Pie

Before He Finishes

'b' takes an 'm' (bóthar -> ar an mbóthar), 'c' takes a 'g' (cóta -> as an gcóta), and so on

In primary school, we learnt Stephen Gerrard Robbed My Lollipop to remember the counties in Connacht:

Sligo
Galway
Roscommon
Mayo
Leitrim

Trying to make up little acronyms and mnemonics is a fun way to study that's not too boring or time consuming. If I wanted to come up with an mnemonic for the substances that make up soil, I would do as follows.

The substances are: