register for “word of the day” at dictionary.com

Once you register dictionary.com will mail you one word per day along with its pronounciation, meaning, root and three sentences to understand it better.

Find fellow GRE takers or any friend who is eager to learn new words.

Get at least two friends interested to try this. More the merrier. Ask them to register at “word for the day” dictionary.com

Now you are ready.

Each day you will recieve one word. Study it carefully. Now use this word in a sentence and mail it to your friends. Ask them to do the same. For every word you get each day, you have the sample sentences given by dictionary.com, your sentence and the sentences mailed by your friends.

More the sentences you read with the word in it better the word gets instilled in memory.

Now do this every day. At the end of the week (say sunday) you have 6 words used in several sentences. Hopefully you have studied these words well. Now the challenge- try and use all of these 6 words in a short paragraph or a one-page write up. Its difficult to come up with relevant connections with these words but its possible.  Be sure to make the write up as imaginative and visual as you can. Avoid just connecting two sentences for the heck of it. The more visual the write up the longer it will stay with you.

Ask your friends to do the same. You should read their write up along with yours. All the creative ways that everyone connects these words in a paragraph can help you picturize the meaning of the words better. Now, these six words are more than instilled in you. Whenever you encounter any of the 6 words, chances are you will remember the paragraph you wrote which will help you remeber the exact meaning of the word correctly. You will be able to recall all of them at 3 am in the morning if asked to.

Here is an example with just two words.

Monday: lacuna- a gap or missing part in a theroy or argument, rift

sentence: The new research provided data that allowed to reduce the lacuna in the theory of Proximity.

Tuesday: melancholy- depression, gloomy, sober thoughtfulness

sentence: Moving back from England, she often spent her evenings on the deck in melancholy silence.

Write up:

He sat down on the wooden floor perplexed as he read through the hand-written pages. He wished he knew her better when he had the chance. His daughter was dead and he didn’t know anything about her. His adamancy had pushed her away creating a lacuna that he couldn’t overcome. He flipped through the pages to see photos stuck to a glitter covered page. One photo caught his eye. It was a picture of his daughter and her mother at Central Park. They both were laughing brilliantly on that autumn evening. A tear rolled down his cheek as he shut the journal and looked out the attic window melancholy and lost. How could this have happened? Where had he gone wrong.

Now you’ve the general idea.

Keep doing this for a period of time after which you can upgrade to 2 words each day to maybe later 3 words each day. Make sure when you use these words in a write up do not cramp them up together. Don’t push yourself to write a paragraph with more than 12 words at a time. If necessary move up the interval. So that if you are learning 3 new words each day then every fourth day will be the write up day.

If you have talented writer friends then there is the added inclination to have the best write up. Basically the more you put yourself into this the better you will own the words.

The process takes less than a minute and you can remember the number or those numbers for about one or two days. It can be used with words but it isn’t useful because the words can be connected mentally with other events that make you remember them better than numbers that are not connected with anything, and because of that are hard to memorize. This can definitely be used for remembering important numbers like credit cards, pins, etc.

These are the three steps you have to follow:

1. When You See The Number You Want, Focus On It
   

   Do not let anyone or anything interrupt you concentration; concentrate very hard on it, a lot more though if it is a long number. Explore the details of the graphic design and its context. For example: 0800-6445, the telephone number of a garage, and imagine the “0” are wheels, remembering that will make it easier for you to remember the whole number.

2. Close Your Eyes, Remember It

   Now, when you do not see the number anymore because you are in a bus for example, and it’s moving, close your eyes and focus on the image (that now is on you mind) very hard, concentrate on its details. Then, with your eyes closed and the image on your mind, review the number about ten times until you feel a “click”, you will start to feel that the number starts to sound you familiar, then go on to the last step.

3. Open Your Eyes, Remember It

   Finally, open your eyes (if you didn’t fall asleep) and try to remember the number while you look outside or you listen to music. Try to lose concentration for a while and then try to remember the number on your mind. If this is hard to do (the number is gloomy or you have numbers missing), immediately close your eyes and concentrate again on the image, and repeat step two.

Some Tips:

• If you have a really long number like this: 487455248774, maybe you have to mentally separate it in four parts like this: 487-455-248-774. Also you will have to expand more time to remember numbers like this, and also you will have to commit to memory the two first parts and then the second and the third.
• Continuing with the large numbers, I will advise you to divide them in equal parts or parts that have many same numbers or consecutive numbers, like this:

808567001…to…808-567-001

3555123… to… 3-555-123

If you can’t divide it in identical parts try to split it in odd or even parts.