How should I memorize a speech?
I don’t generally memorize any of my presentations. If you create a detailed outline and then practice giving your speech to a few friends, you’ll probably do fine unless you have really bad stage fright.
If you do have stage fright, simply memorizing your speech word for word is likely to cause you problems because it will be difficult to remember while under pressure. If you want to give your speech word for word, you can memorize it, but keep the speech with you just in case you have to revert to reading the speech. If you do this, make sure you use some type of method to keep track of where you are in the speech. You don’t want to stumble around for 2 minutes trying to find your place if you get lost.
For verbatim memorization, checkout this method. It contains a simple tool for practicing memorization.
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I entered a speech contest – seven minutes in a foreign language in front of 1000 people and five TV cameras.
I found that talking out loud while walking helped a lot. I deliberately took another bus to work that made me walk 30min along a noisy road – so I would just read it out loud while walking.
The road was so loud nobody would notice – I later also took to mumbling the speech in the gym. It really helped to move – like a little choreography. No doubt you will also have your little gestures with certain words and sentences…
(But then I am a kinetic learning type)
Another thing that helps you look calm is to look slow from left to right and back to right, scanning the room.
I use (well, used, back in school when I had to memorize things) a technique similar to the link you gave, but a little more holistic.
I started reading through the entire speech until fluent. Then highlight some of the key words to help you find them faster when you glance. Then cut out everything but the key words. Then see how many of those you can get rid of.
At every step, read through again and again until you can recite it fluently with the amount of notes you have left, at which point you’ll have a good sense of what you don’t need anymore.
Usually I stopped with a bulleted list of a half dozen words or so, and didn’t worry about verbatim, just ideas (sometimes I stopped with the full text and highlighted words – I only had to look at the keywords, but the rest was there as a safety net, and saved the effort of re-writing). but with more time and effort you could push the technique farther.