Step 5 of 8
Keeping the letters in your head
The goal
To hold about 20 random letters for the whole solve. Just repeating them will not do: pairs and pictures will.
How to do it
- Split the list into pairs: not 12 letters but 6 pairs. One letter left without a pair? That means parity: the next lesson deals with it.
- Give each pair an image: a word with these letters that is easy to picture. A word where they are not side by side will do too, as long as the order is the same.
- Link the images into a short story, the stranger the better. The order of the story is the order of the letters.
- Edges and corners are two separate stories. Recall the edges, solve them, then the corners.
An example: the letters of the worked solve
Letters
Edges
QUqueen
SRsir
NXNixon
IVivy
PRprince
DEdeer
Story The queen knights a sir. He hands Nixon some ivy, and a prince feeds it to a deer.
Corners
MWmower
QXQuixote
MDmedal
UIruin
VPVIP
Story A mower chases Don Quixote. His medal falls among the ruins, and a VIP picks it up.
How to get used to it
›Make up your own images: yours stick better than anyone else's. Keep the good ones for that pair for good, and the list will build itself.
›At first write the letters on paper and solve from that. In competition it is not allowed, but for the first solves it is the best way.
›Do not rush the memo. The first solves can take many minutes, and that is normal.
If it does not work
›Forgetting the middle? The story is too ordinary: make the images bigger and funnier, and have them act on each other.
›For rare pairs like XW any word or name with those letters will do: nobody but you will see it.