ABSTRACT
You will often hear people say, ‘I have a terrible memory’ or ‘I wish I had as good a memory as he does’. But it's wrong to believe that your memory is good or bad and that nothing can be done about it. It's more likely that you aren't using your memory effectively. If you think to yourself, ‘Oh dear, what a lot of information to remember!’, you will most likely have trouble remembering much of it later. Indeed, if you are just trying to ‘memorize’ what you hear, you probably won't be able to. But if you can identify the type of information that you are hearing and the format in which it's being presented to you, then the interpreter has a number of tools at their disposal to back up their memory. Try, for example, to listen to a speech and break it down into one of the following types of memory prompts:
Narrative: the speech tells a story in which one part follows another chronologically or by cause and effect.
Structural: the speech is made up of clearly distinct parts, for example, beginning/middle/end or Point 1/Point 2/Point 3.
Visual: the speech lends itself to visualization in the mind's eye.
Logical: each part of the speech leads logically to the next, for example by cause and effect.
Notes: in this part of the book we’ll be working without notes, but notes are, of course, one of the important memory prompts an interpreter can use. Deciding what to note is an important part of the memorization process.
