How shall you concentrate?  How would you increase the fighting-effectiveness of a man-of-war?  One vital way would be to increase the size and number of its guns.  To strengthen your memory, increase both the number and the force of your mental impressions by attending to them intensely.  Loose, skimming reading, and drifting habits of reading destroy memory power.  However, as most books and newspapers do not warrant any other kind of attention, it will not do altogether to condemn this method of reading; but avoid it when you are trying to memorize.

Environment has a strong influence upon concentration, until you have learned to be alone in a crowd and undisturbed by clamor.  When you set out to memorize a fact or a speech, you may find the task easier away from all sounds and moving objects.  All impressions foreign to the one you desire to fix in your mind must be eliminated.

The next great step in memorizing is to pick out the essentials of the subject, arrange them in order, and dwell upon them intently.  Think clearly of each essential, one after the other. Thinking a thing—­not allowing the mind to wander to non-essentials—­is really memorizing.

Association of ideas is universally recognized as an essential in memory work; indeed, whole systems of memory training have been founded on this principle.

Many speakers memorize only the outlines of their addresses, filling in the words at the moment of speaking.  Some have found it helpful to remember an outline by associating the different points with objects in the room.  Speaking on “Peace,” you may wish to dwell on the cost the cruelty, and the failure of war, and so lead to the justice of arbitration.  Before going on the platform if you will associate four divisions of your outline with four objects in the room, this association may help you to recall them.  You may be prone to forget your third point, but you remember that once when you were speaking the electric lights failed, so arbitrarily the electric light globe will help you to remember “failure.”  Such associations, being unique, tend to stick in the mind.  While recently speaking on the six kinds of imagination the present writer formed them into an acrostic—­visual, auditory, motor, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile, furnished the nonsense word vamgot, but the six points were easily remembered.

In the same way that children are taught to remember the spelling of teasing words—­separate comes from separ—­and as an automobile driver remembers that two C’s and then two H’s lead him into Castor Road, Cottman Street, Haynes Street and Henry Street, so important points in your address may be fixed in mind by arbitrary symbols invented by yourself.  The very work of devising the scheme is a memory action.  The psychological process is simple:  it is one of noting intently the steps by which a fact, or a truth, or even a word, has come to you.  Take advantage of this tendency of the mind to remember by association.