Study your material without distractions. Turn off the television or cell phone and find a quiet place to concentrate on the material. Read the information aloud or to someone else.
Rewrite sections of the material as you go. Also, try listening to the material as it's read by someone else to better ingest it.
Write everything you recall about the material on a piece of paper. Or if it's a speech, you can recite everything you remember about it. Look back at the original information to find the holes in your knowledge.
Make an outline of the material to activate your memory. In a way, an outline is a verbal puzzle for your memorization skills. It will provide highlights and clues, and your brain can extrapolate what the clues mean.
Write out the beginning letter of each word that needs to be memorized. Next read the passage made up of single letters and get as far as you can. Go back to read the original passage again and then go back to your wordless version. Continue until you can recite the original using only the single letters as a guide.
Form silly sentences to jar your memory. For instance, if you have to memorize Swedish cities, such as Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö, link the information to an easy sentence, such as Steven Greeted Me. The first letters -- SGM -- will clue you to the cities' names.