welcome back to the channel. If you are new here, my name is Ali

I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video

I'm going to share with you the essay memorization framework that I

used when I was in my third year at Cambridge University.

That was the year,

in which I was studying psychology and I actually ended up winning the prize for best

exam performance in the year (yay) group and I've pretty much exclusively

attributed that to this essay memorization framework

This method should work for most essay based subjects,

but even if your subject is an essay based

I hope you might still find this video useful and pick up a

few tips and techniques along the way and of course, everything I'm

going to mention is going to be linked in timestamps in the video

description and in a pinned comment so you can skip around the

video if you feel like it, let's just jump into it

So there are basically two stages to this method.

The first stage is the creation stage

and the second stage is the memorization stage.

So in the creation stage, the objective is to create

first-class essay plans for every conceivable

essay title that they could throw at us in the exam.

And in the memorization stage,

we're going to be committing all of these essay plans to memory

by systematically using active recall, spaced repetition,

spider diagrams, and flashcards.

The idea is that by the time the exam rolls around,

you'll have memorized so many essay plans that a lot of them will

just come up in the exam anyway

because you've predicted the titles and you'll just

be able to regurgitate stuff from your brain onto the paper,

but even if stuff comes up that you haven't memorized

You'll know so much about the subject and you'll have so many

content blocks in your head that you'll be able to generate a first-class

Essay from scratch.

So that was a general overview.

Let's now talk about the two components: the creation state and the memorization stage in turn.

So the broad objective of the creation stage is to create a large

number of really really good essay plans that you can then memorize

In the memorization stage and regurgitate onto paper during your exam.

Now, it's probably beyond the scope of this video for me

to teach you how to write a good essay and

probably also beyond the scope of my own expertise.

But I will share some tips on three main questions and that's

firstly how you decide what essay titles to pick.

Secondly, how you plan the essay and thirdly how you make sure your essay plan is really really good.

So let's deal with those in turn so firstly how do we decide what I say is we're going to prepare

the objective here is to scope the subject and find essay

titles that cover the entire breadth of the syllabus. Now the easiest way to

do this is to look at past papers and look at whatever pause papers you

have available and see what essays have come up in

the past and you start off with those and then once you've planned

out those essays, you'll know enough about that subject in particular

that you'll be able to put yourself in the shoes of examiner's and start thinking,

"okay

what's a good essay titled that I've not yet asked about?"

If you haven't got past papers available that I'm very sorry to hear that.

You're just gonna have to put yourself into the examiners shoes from the get-go

or you can actually go to your teacher, your professor, your lecturer, or whatever and say, "hey,

what's the sort of essays that might come up in the exam? What are some things other things

I should be thinking about?

So, having made a list of what essays we're going to plan,

we then need to actually plan those essays and this is the fun part.

This is the part that actually requires doing some doing some cognitive labor

So the way I would do this is that I'd give myself one day per essay plan.

So in, in the first time of uni

I was a slacker only made like five essay plans.

In the second term I made about ten, and then, in the Easter holidays

i've really ramped it up and made about 35 different ones.

And the way I do it is that i'd start off with a question.

So, for example, do animals have a theory of mind and then I would use Google

To get as much information as I can about that particular question

I would ignore the lecture notes initially

and I would ignore the recommended reading

I'd start off with Google because Google was, it was like a really

good way to find the answer to any question that you want.

And often I'd be linked to review articles and review papers,

and I'd be reading through those review papers

Oftentimes, the review paper would directly answer the question,

in which case I've pretty much got my essay.

I just need to turn it into my own words,

but a lot of the time, I'd be following references from the route

from the review paper. And then,

once I'd created my essay plan

I would then look at the lecture notes and the recommended reading

and this meant that a lot of my material was hopefully more original

than everyone else's because most of the students

would have built their essays based around the lecture notes.

Whereas I was building my essays on a random Google search.

So, I would start off by creating a research document on

that particular topic and pretty much copy and paste every relevant bit of every

paper I could find.

So, this is my 10 page document about theory of mind.

I've copied and pasted various bits and rephrased various bits.

And you know, very random. I don't even know any of this anymore.

This is, and you, know included links at the bottom to

where I got the information from so if I need to return to it,

I'll be able to find it again.

And then once I've got my research document, I spent the next few hours

planning out the essay and actually writing it out properly.

So, here is my plan, "Is theory of mind a useful concept for understanding social cognition and animals?" And

yeah, I've got an intro, I've got a preamble, I've got subheadings,

I've got evidence

And I've basically taken all of this from these various

different resources from books, from the review papers, from the lecture notes, from Google.

And I've consolidated them into this one essay that I'm

ultimately going to memorize. And as you can see over here,

I've pretty much done this for everything within my subject.

So this is Section B, "Comparative Cognition,"

which is all about the thinking of animals, can an animal's plan for the future?

Causality, Cognitive Maps, the Convergent Evolution Theory of Intelligence.

"Do animals have a theory of mind?" "Is a theorem an useful concept." And you can see here,

I've written an key beside them,

which is a foreshadowing as to what's gonna come later in this video.

So now we've done a research document. We've planned this essay.

We've pretty much written it out based on a research document

and we've only given ourselves one day to do this because of Parkinson's law.

That work expands to fill the time we allocate to it.

But how do we make the essay plan actually good.

A lot of things go into good essay plan

but in my opinion, there are three things that count .

Number one, structure

Number two, actually answering the question.

And number three,

having a bit of flair, a bit of a spice that you're sprinkling in your essay plan.

And I think the introduction is the most important part of the essay.

because in the introduction, you can signal to the examiner that

you're doing all three of these things and when the examiner is marking your paper.

They're probably really bored,

they've read hundreds of these scripts already.

You want to hit them with like a really legit introduction.

So here's an example of an introduction from one of my essays about,

"Weather judgment and decision making is cognitive,

ideological, or affective ie. emotional."

So, I written that, "The historical view in social sciences has always been that judgments

are based solely on content information, with individuals being assumed

to form judgments by systematically evaluating all available

content information in an unbiased manner."

Oh my god.

However, over the past three decades a considerable

amount of research has challenged this assumption by showing that

Judgments may be formed not only

on the basis of content information (cognitive judgments)

but also on the basis of feelings (affective judgment).

It is now well accepted that judgment can be both effective and cognitive."

And here's where the good stuff comes

"Whether it is one of the other depends on a multitude of factors;

(1) the salience of the affective feelings, (2) the

representativeness of the affective feelings for the target,

(3) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment, (4) the evaluative

malleability of the judgment, and (5) the level of processing intensity.

And here is the ultimate clincher for this.

"I will discuss these in

turn and ultimately argue that generally speaking in day-to-day life,

the circumstances are generally those that result an effective rather

than cognitive and decision-making."

So, if we can disentangle all the verbosity from that paragraph, what I've done is I've

laid out the five main bits of the essay, in terms of structure

and I've used numbered points for that rather than just a list

because numbered makes it really really obvious to the examiner that I've got

a good structure. I've also said exactly what the answer to the question is.

The question is asking whether our judgments are cognitive,

(biological?), or affective emotional and instead of wishingwatching around it,

I have said in this essay, "I will argue that they are

emotional rather than cognitive in most elements of day-to-day life."

So I'm telling the examiner, "Look, I'm answering the question,

this is what you're gonna get from me." And finally I've added a little bit of flair.

Hopefully with this stuff about the historical context

I probably got that from a textbook or from a review paper somewhere

and I've probably phrased into my own notes

and obviously this is just my plan.

So in the exam, I won't quite be using it word-for-word.

So, it's absolutely not plagiarism.

It's using, you know, useful resources to create a bit of flair by adding a bit of historical context.

So hopefully this introduction covers all three points:

structure, answering question, and a bit of flair.

Now, I'm gonna leave it at that for this section of the video.

Obviously, you know, there are entire university courses andentire books

and stuff, devoted to the art of writing a good essay.

I don't personally think I'm very good at writing an essay,

but I think I'm pretty good at using Google effectively and copying and pasting

stuff into a research word document and then turning it into

fairly legit sounding prose and

then, I think I'm pretty good at systematically memorizing all that information.

So,

if you want to know more about how to write an essay,

how I write an essay, then let me know in the comments and

I'll maybe try and do a video on it if I can kind of break down the process a bit further.

But now let's talk about stage two of the process:

The memorization stage.

Okay, so by this point,

we've got a load of really good essay plans that we have created

in Word documents. Now the objective in the memorization stage is to

upload, all of those essay plans to our brain so that we canthen regurgitate

them in the exam and we're gonna do this using

three main techniques: Number one, ANKI flashcards.

Number two, spider diagrams

And number three, a retrospective revision timetable.

So again,

Let's talk about these in turn.

So firstly, ANKI, and I've basically used Anki flashcards to memorize

every paragraph, in every essay plan and this might seem a bit overkill, but it worked for me.

So what I've done is as you can see,

I've got keywords on the front of the card like "Bauer in 1984"

or "Damisch et al 2006" or "Ellis

et al 1997," or short-term versus long-term memory introduction.

I've even put the introduction into an ANKI flashcard and then over time

I'll memorize

these, because pretty much anything that goes into my ANKI flashcards

because during the exam term, I'm going through my flashcards every single day and

I'm doing and keep spaced repetition algorithm.