t of
ideas comes to mind; with a typewriter slightly different ideas arise;
when talking to an audience, still different ideas. Three sets of ideas
and three vocabularies are thus available for use on any subject. In
adopting this device of composing through several mediums, you should
combine with it the principle of distributing time already discussed in
connection with repetition of impressions. Write a theme one day,
then lay it aside for a few days and go back to it with a fresh mind.
The rests will be found very beneficial in helping you to get a new
viewpoint of the subject.

Reverting to our discussion of memory, we come upon another question:
In memorizing material like the poem of our example, should one impress
the entire poem at once, or break it up into parts, impressing a stanza
each day? Most people would respond, without thought, the latter, and,
as a matter of fact, most memorizing takes place in this way.
Experimental psychology, however, has discovered that this is
uneconomical. The selection, if of moderate length, should be impressed
as a whole. If too long for this, it should be broken up as little as
possible. In order to see the necessity for this let us examine your
experiences with the memorization of poems in your early school days.
You probably proceeded as follows: After school one day, you learned
the first stanza, then went out to play. The next day you learned the
second one, and so on. You thought at the end of a week that you had
memorized it because, at the end of each day's sitting, you were able
to recite perfectly the stanza learned that day. On "speaking day" you
started out bravely and recited the first stanza without mishap. When
you started to think of the second one, however, it would not come. The
memory balked. Now what was the matter? How can we explain this
distressing blank? In psychological terms, we ascribe the difficulty to
the failure to make proper associations between stanzas. Association
was made effectively between the lines of the single stanzas, but not
between the separate stanzas. After you finished impressing the first
stanza, you went about something else; playing ball, perhaps. When you
approached the poem the next day you started in with the second stanza.
There was then no bridge between the two. There was nothing to link the
last line of the first stanza,

"And things are not what they seem,"

with the first line of the next stanza,

"Life is real, l