Lincoln's Memory and Rhetoric

[David Lockmiller]

Reading Information Aloud to Yourself Improves Memory
Neuroscience News - DECEMBER 1, 2017

A recent Waterloo study found that speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory. Dubbed the “production effect,” the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory.

“This study confirms that learning and memory benefit from active involvement,” said Colin M. MacLeod, a professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Waterloo, who co-authored the study with the lead author, post-doctoral fellow Noah Forrin. “When we add an active measure or a production element to a word, that word becomes more distinct in long-term memory, and hence more memorable.”

Lincoln’s Rhetoric
By Douglas L. Wilson

Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association
Volume 34, Issue 1, Winter 2013, pp. 1-17
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0034.103

Much to Herndon’s annoyance, it was Lincoln’s regular practice to do his office reading aloud, which he justified by saying that both hearing and seeing what he read enabled him to remember it better.[32] To get inside the distinctiveness and effectiveness of his rhetoric, we must come to terms with the sound and rhythm of Lincoln’s compositions.

Lincoln seems to have had an early and long-standing attachment to the sounds of words. Learning to read in “blab” schools, where all the students read aloud (and at the same time), may have been instrumental in starting him in this direction. If true, this would suggest that it was perhaps as fundamental as his early fascination with crafting letters, words, and phrases. Working with words may well have been an aural experience from the beginning that became ingrained in his thought process. These are speculations, to be sure, but there is abundant evidence that Lincoln had long made a practice of reading his writings aloud to test them. One of his law students remembered him saying as early as 1845, “I write by ear. When I have got my thoughts on paper, I read it aloud, and if it sounds all right I just let it pass.”[33]

He certainly punctuated by ear, much to the chagrin of John Defrees, who fought a losing battle trying to purge the excessive commas from the state papers Lincoln sent to the government printing office.[34] As president it was still his custom, according to one of his secretaries, “to read his manuscript over aloud, ‘to see how it sounded, as he could hardly judge of a thing by merely reading it.’”[35] The suggestion common to these and other recollections is that he couldn’t pass on the acceptability of what he had composed until he had heard it uttered aloud. In addition, we have evidence that he read virtually every one of his major presidential writings to a confidant before release or delivery.[36]

31. Roy P. Basler, “Abraham Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” American Literature 11, no. 2 (May 1939): 176.
32. Ibid., citing William H. Herndon’s October 21, 1885, letter to Jesse W. Weik.
33. Gibson William Harris, “My Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Woman’s Home Companion (January 1904), 13. I am indebted to Michael Burlingame for calling my attention to this recollected remark.
34. See Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, 86–90.
35. William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 172.
36. See Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, 180–81.