Letter strategies, which involve using letter prompts to remember lists of things, are the most familiar to students. Most former students remember using the acronym HOMES to remember the names of the Great Lakes and FACE to remember the notes represented in the spaces of the treble clef, from bottom to top. Except for the FACE strategy, however, most acronyms assume that a name of something will be remembered when the first letter is retrieved. However, this may not always be true. For example, if a student is unfamiliar with Lake Ontario, remembering simply that the first letter is O is insufficient to prompt recall. The names of the individual lakes must be practiced until they have become familiar.

Acronyms are most helpful when the first letters of a list can be used to create an entire word; however, sometimes modifications can be made. For instance, consider the acronym FARM-B, which represents the five classes of vertebrate animals: fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal, and bird. The B for bird does not really fit, but it can be added to FARM and practiced until it becomes automatic.

In other cases, appropriate words cannot be easily constructed from the first letters of the words to be remembered. For example, if you wished to remember the names of the planets in their order from the sun, the letters would be M-V-E-M-J-S-U-N-P, from which a word cannot be made. In these cases, an acrostic can be created, in which the first letters are reconstructed to represent the words in a sentence. In this case, the sentence could be "My very educated mother just sent us nine pizzas" (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1993, p.271). Again, the names of the planets must be sufficiently familiar so that students can retrieve a planet name, given only the first letter. Also, students should be sufficiently familiar with the solar system to know that the first M stands for Mercury, and not Mars.

For another example, to remember the classification taxonomy of living things, remember the sentence, "King Phillip's class ordered a family of gentle spaniels." This sentence helps prompt kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, in order.

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