Of Paul Revere's Ride By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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For this project, I selected Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The reason that I selected this poem was that when we lived in Massachusetts we lived in Concord. Concord was the end point of Paul Revere’s Ride. Given this, every year on April 18th, the town put on the reenactment of the battle of Lexington and Concord, at this reenactment every year they recited Longfellow’s poem. I always loved hearing this poem, so I thought that it be a good choice to memorize. The three techniques that I used to memorize this poem that we discussed in class were visualization, rote repetition, and chunking. Visualization is the process of using mental process to produce a visual image mentally. When memorizing this poem, I used visualization by visualizing each line of the poem. Visualization was fairly easy with this poem, as the poem in a way told a story and used imagery, throughout. Chunking is grouping together connected items or words so that it is stored as one piece of information. This poem was really easy to chunk as it had rhyming. Due to the rhyming, it was easy to remember the chunks of rhyming information. …show more content…

Probably the most difficult part was the frustration that came with attempting to memorize something so long. I would become very frustrated with myself every time that I got a line or section of the poem wrong. I have always been a perfectionist when it came to school work, so that when I got a line wrong it was frustrating. It also took me longer to memorize the poem than I thought it would. It took me about two weeks to memorize the poem without lots of mistakes. Another difficulty was that I found myself having state dependent memory. Most of the time I would practice the poem right before bed, due to this if I tried to recite it during the day, I would not be as successful in knowing all the lines. Due to this, I made more of an effort to study the poem during the