How to Memorize an Essay

If for whatever reason, you’ve found yourself in a situation where you’re expected to memorize an entire essay, it’s very expected for you to be sweating with anxiety.

And how could you not? Learning sentence-long answers by heart can be trouble enough for many people, let alone a huge chunk of text, filled with a variety of arguments, and a number of particular yet uncommonly used words.

Memorizing an essay is stressful. First, it’s a cognitively very challenging task, but also, the mere thought of doing it can make you panic. As a result, your concentration may falter.

However, your mind needn’t go in this route. Memorizing essays is an achievable thing.

Read more to find out how you can become one of them. Learn essays by heart and swiftly put them to paper, whenever the right time comes.

Have a Clear Essay Structure

In order to be able to easily memorize entire essays, you’ll need to start with one simple activity.

Instead of trying to memorize the whole essay by heart, make the best use of the essay structure to be able to remember the exact flow of arguments.

For instance, you can memorize the introduction separately, by focusing on two things:

The topic of your essay
How you decided to make it interesting for the readers

As soon as you remember a certain phrase or word that you used at the beginning of the essay, you’ll be able to reproduce the introduction on paper.

Similarly, try to remember keywords, phrases, and thoughts from each of your essay’s paragraphs and subheadings. Remember the order of your arguments, which gives a sort of narrative structure to the whole piece.

It all depends on how rigorously you’re expected to memorize your text – whether you need to know verbatim or to just remember the vague outline of the whole thing.

Make a mental sketch of the whole text and just add the rest as you write.

Perform Mind Tricks on Yourself

Alternatively, if you need to memorize every word and phrase, you can try some other techniques in addition. After you’ve memorized the basic structure, try to scan the sentences, and find words, thoughts, and phrases in each that somehow stand out.

Start from the beginning and try to make every single sentence “stick”, so to speak. Whether using an interesting idiom, a play on words, or something similar, by writing an essay that’s not forgettable, you’ll be making your own assignment easier.

Reading Aloud

Next up, start reading the essay aloud. Read it aloud as many times as possible – fully concentrated – in order to add an auditory dimension to the entire endeavour.

This way, you’ll be able to remember your own voice saying it, which will help you associate the text with all sorts of memories and impressions.

Take Your Time

Another thing that you can do is to start learning it way before you need to write it.
Don’t do it the night before. Start a week, or 2 weeks earlier, and practice every day.

By the time the big day comes, repeating the text will already have become second nature to you. Use that and you’ll see how easily you’ll be able to reproduce it.

Try Trial Testings

Finally, test yourself before being tested officially. Without cheating, turn your timer on and try to write the text. Even if you struggle at times, or hit a point where you can’t remember, keep on going, and write what you do remember.

At the end of the day, you can always go back to fill in the gaps if you remember later on, or if you just think of a valid substitute argument or word.

Try to write down every phrase or word that you have difficulty remembering and, during your next studying session, focus on that specific aspect.

The more you do trial tests, the more confident you will be about your performance on the big day. You’ll be calm and collected, and you’ll be able to write everything down with ease.