To you, a lot of the stuff may seem like common sense. But you may be surprised as to how many people lack simple common sense. There are a lot of stupid people in the world... unfortunately, I tend to encounter most of them in a regular day.
Flash cards are effective. When I studied for my Milton exam, I studied with a few classmates, and one of them had made up flash cards. It was the first exam I had taken in years that I actually got an A on, so you know I was stoked. But we ran through the cards a few times, and once I'd gone through them twice, I was pretty much able to go through them the third time with about an 80% success rate, and then the fourth time at 97% (seems arbitrary, but the weird things I got wrong were arbitrary, especially when several cards had multiple answers; for example, there was one question on the ten characteristics of an epic, and I'd always forget one).
And I recommend this as someone who also had a lot of trouble in the past with "rote memorization." People say acronyms work, too. And now I'm remembering two of the ways teachers used to beat stuff into our heads: Kings Play Chess On Fat Girls Stomachs (for Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) as well as Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (for Paranthesis, Exponents [I think; shows how well I remember it now, lol], Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction) for figuring out binomials.