Learning Sets

The following statements are all true.

• It's easier to remember things which are connected.
• It's easier to remember one thing than to remember two things.
• It's easier to remember three things than to remember two things.

...wait, what?

Alright, I cheated a bit. The last one should be "It's easier to remember one thing which connects more two things than to remember two things."

Make sense?

Great, what are the three things I just told you?

Any memory champion can tell you it's easy to remember sets and spaces. Learn synonyms together, and it's easier to remember the meanings of all the words together.

Remembering all the things in a backpack is hard. Remembering all the pockets and what's in each is easy.

Unfortunately, whether formal or informal, most memory exercises are about individual items.

There's any number of reasons things which are part of a set, artificial or deliberate, will be split when you learn them. Similar things come up far apart because they aren't related, they just have similar names. You learn things one at a time as you need them, or you split up the learning for spaced repetition. Things come up together, but there's so many things in the larger set that you don't learn to differentiate the smaller one.

If you have a strong memory or enough other context to make do, that can be fine. But if you struggle to remember the difference, it's going to be rough.

Here's a little example. How many times have I used it's in this post?

It's more than half a dozen. But when I started writing this blog, I couldn't remember if it was it's or its. Every time I proofread I was uncertain, so I'd search "whats the contraction for it is" every time. Functional, but it's slow.

Turns out, pretty hard to remember both if you only remember them one at a time. If you can't keep them straight, you'll end up guessing the same answer for both, and you'll be right half the time.

If one of them is more common than the other (I use it's frequently), you end up guessing that one every time. You'll do better than chance, but you're still guessing 100% of the time. If you're using a formalized flashcard system or something else which splits ideas up, you'll never have a chance to properly clarify the set.

So do it yourself, relearn them as a set. "It's stole the apostrophe from the possessive its, what a contradiction." Whatever works for you.

After a while, it'll became second nature. Nowadays I mentally recoil when I see its wrong, it just looks off.¹ I've seen it too often. The set is just training wheels for your true memory, you can pop them off once the memory is stuck.

Now replace it's and its with two people with similar faces and names.

Memory matters.

Good luck,

- Rew

Nightly Notes

I once spotted an it's its typo twenty minutes after sending out a document. I knew the receiver wouldn't notice or care, but I'm still annoyed it happened because of what it indicates.

Memory is the foundation of skill. If you can't churn out the fundamentals of clear spelling, how are you planning to get any writing done?

One of the many reasons I decided to lock myself into a daily release schedule was to force that skill building, although I certainly wasn't expecting to stop mixing it's with its to be one of the noticeable changes.

I wonder what else I've missed.

This post snuck up on me, I was doing something entirely unrelated to this when it came to mind. Then I realized I simply had to write it while the idea was hot. The opener format is stolen from an old draft on a different topic where I couldn't get the contradiction to line up nicely. I think it works well here.

I had a brief phase of wondering if I would run out of topics, but I haven't even touched things I assumed would be old hat by now. 70+ posts in, I'm feeling quite confident I can keep this up indefinitely.

We'll see if it lasts.

- Rew