Monday, October 17, 2011

Memorizing the Preamble

I'm presenting an Honors Humanities lecture on the U.S. Constitution tomorrow and, for no particular reason, I've committed to memorizing the Preamble. As most of my pals know, memory is one of my weakest public speaking skills. Indeed, I spent a couple hours on a recent evening working through various mnemonic techniques - just to wrap my brain around that danged Fifth Amendment [so many "nors"!]. So far, the classic approach seems to work best for me: storing bits of information in "places" that form a logical narrative. Still, for those folks who are more musically inclined, there is at least one other way to learn that danged Preamble…

2 comments:

Jenny Wood said...

Absolutely!! I still know the preamble because of Schoolhouse Rock! Of course, I would have to sing it to get it right. :-)

Mod Betty / RetroRoadmap.com said...

As soon as I saw the title to this post that song came into my head! I always have said that I learned more about English from Schoolhouse rock and Mad Libs than my grammar school classes! "A noun is a person place or thing" :-)