If you can illustrate your items with examples that are vivid or even shocking, you are likely to enhance retrieval (as long as you do not overuse same tools and fall victim of interference!). Your items may assume bizarre form; however, as long as they are produced for your private consumption, the end justifies the means. Use objects that evoke very specific and strong emotions: love, sex, war, your late relative, object of your infatuation, Linda Tripp, Nelson Mandela, etc. It is well known that emotional states can facilitate recall; however, you should make sure that you are not deprived of the said emotional clues at the moment when you need to retrieve a given memory in a real-life situation

If you have vivid and positive memories related to the meetings between Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, you are likely to quickly grasp the meaning of the definition of banter. Without the example you might struggle with interference from words such as badinage or even chat. There is no risk of irrelevant emotional state in this example as the state helps to define the semantics of the learned concept! A well-thought example can often reduce your learning time several times! I have recorded examples in which an item without an example was forgotten 20 times within one year, while the same item with a subtle interference-busting example was not forgotten even once in ten repetitions spread over five years. This is roughly equivalent to 25-fold saving in time in the period of 20 years! Such examples are not rare! They are most effectively handled with the all the preceding rules targeted on simplicity and against the interference