In her article, Hammond talks about how exactly people remember events. She explains that we as humans don't remember specific events due to their objective importance, we remember them depending on how we heard, where we were, and what we was happening in our lives at the time. Hammond introduces this theory by asking the readers how many details they remember from the Newtown shootings and Boston Marathon bombing and then how many they will remember in a month or a year from now. By using a significant topic that many people can connect to Hammond captures the readers attention and smoothly transitions into her argument. Next, she presents her evidence by citing statistics and experiments by other psychologists. She proves that in other experiments location and the way you get the information are signifiant in remembering certain events. She cites psychologist John Neil Bohannon's experiment, where he asked college students and alumni from 1942-1945 about Pearl Harbor and found that "if they heard it on the news or read it in a newspaper, they remembered more facts about the event". She also talks about peoples' struggle to remember the timing of an event, an issue that is probably relatable to her audience. This is in fact, a phenomenon called telescoping, where its especially difficult to figure out when events happened because we always think that they happened more recently than they did. She then provides a anecdote of an event in her own life as an example.
By using credible sources and significant events that readers are likely to connect to Hammond is able to write an interesting article that explains the psychology behind remembering the past that informs and entertains her audience.
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