Public Speaking. Top tips for Memorising
There are many ways to help you to remember what you have to say;
schemes to help clarify, simplify or order thoughts and ideas,
never forgetting there is a significant difference between ‘helping to remember’ and ‘memorising’.
‘Memorise’ conjures up images or memories (!) of life at school, learning bits of poetry by heart, or learning dates for a history test.
However, a good speech is usually a series of ideas, not a series of words.
I made an interesting discovery during the Covid pandemic. Bored and discouraged as I was, locked-in with the miserable flow of daily news, I decided to try to put some more uplifting thoughts into my head and began to memorise some poems.
Having got used to delivering speeches without notes, I was struck by how hard it was to commit a few short lines of verse to memory.
As speakers, we just need to find a way to remember the key elements of our speech, and that is very different from memorising word for word.
‘Remembering’ something usually means that it is already there in our head;
‘memorising’ implies something more forced.
I can still tell you all the train stations between my home and my school, even though that was 50 years ago, and I never actually memorised them.
In fact, I can tell you most of the stations on the other lines as well, because I heard them being announced every day for seven years.
The problem I discovered in ‘memorising’ poems was that because I was learning them word for word, if I forgot the next word in a sequence, I was lost! Word-for-word memorising is rigid and does not allow for spontaneity and flexibility, which is essential when presenting.
Word-for-word has us right amongst it, too fixed on the next word, whereas vocalising lets us float above our speech, looking down on which ideas are coming next.
At the risk of sounding like hair-splitting, we need to find a way to ‘remember’ our speech, rather than trying to ‘memorise’ our speech.
The term I use is:
‘Vocalise rather than memorise’, which is more about letting the sequence of ideas settle instead of trying to retain too many individual words.
I will explain this in further detail as part of the tips below.
If we remember back to school days when we had an exam on a Tuesday morning, and I had avoided all attempts at revision in the previous weeks, on Monday night, I would cram as much as I could into my short-term memory, hoping that what I had memorised would stay with me for the exam in the morning. That may or may not have been a successful strategy for passing the exam, but whether pass or failed, most of what I learnt on Monday evening was already forgotten again by Wednesday.
So the main problem most speakers have in ‘remembering’ their speech, is that they start too late in their preparation for their presentation and are therefore forced to cram rather than allowing it to settle.
They then discover it is too risky, too late, or just not possible for them to remember so much detail and resort to writing the presentation out word for word and reading it, or realising they cannot cram it into their heads in time, instead cramming it all onto too many PowerPoint slides. (Sound familiar?)
I remember a student once telling me that her managing director was brilliant at presenting. He would deliver a full thirty-minute presentation without any notes. She said it always flowed and made sense, and he never got lost in his words.
The reason was simple: he was talking about his business! He had been working in it for thirty-five years, and his main problem when presenting was not remembering what he wanted to say, it was knowing what to leave out!
10 tips for remembering (note – not memorising!) a speech
Most of these require a bit of time to allow the content of the speech to settle, though some are simple techniques for organising ideas at shorter notice (just in case you have left most of your preparation to Monday evening)
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Do you need to memorise?
Deciding to deliver a speech without notes should not be some act of machismo, like eating three shredded wheat or going out wearing only a cotton T-shirt when it is minus 5 degrees outside.
Does it improve the impact of the speech?.
Therefore, first question:
Do I even need to deliver without notes?
The main effect of not speaking to notes is to come across as more spontaneous, to interact with your audience, to have greater authority and to create a stronger connection with your listeners.
If the main purpose of your presentation is to deliver precise and accurate information, there is no benefit in doing that without notes. In fact, it might be dangerous.
Facts need to be right and so benefit from notes; opinions are personal and benefit from without.
Donald Trump is much more comfortable without notes, which works well when he is campaigning, sharing his thoughts or ‘riffing’ on themes of MAGA, injustice and persecution. However, it means that when he went off message as the President of the USA, he needed a team of advisors and explainers to follow behind to put what he said into context, justify or even counteract what he might have said on the fly.
If the accuracy of the content is more important than the person delivering it, there seems little benefit in speaking without notes.
Therefore, when preparing, make a clear distinction between personal opinions that you are ‘sharing’ and information that you are ‘delivering’
You may decide to deliver most of your presentation without notes to increase your presence and credibility, but if you have a precisely worded quote from an expert or a significant set of figures to announce, there is no great advantage and plenty of danger in not reading them out.
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Last things first
I live in London, and if I want to go to Peterborough, it is directly north of where I am. So if I first establish where I want to get to, I can then start working out the best route to get there. Many presenters know they need to go on a journey, open up PowerPoint and start by deciding whether to begin by going up the road or down the road. They cannot know whether that is the best way to start until they know where they want to end. In fact, everything about the presentation will depend on where you want to go.
Therefore, the most important first step in developing a scheme to help you deliver your presentation is to develop a very clear focus on the destination.
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Work backwards
Often, a broad structure will reveal itself: there may be five steps towards a conclusion or four parts of a process.
If there is nothing like that crying out to you, revert to the speaker’s structural friend – ‘three’:
three sections, three ideas, three stages. That might reveal itself to you as:
past, present, future, or one point of view, another point of view and a conclusion, or:
What the problem is, why it is important and how we can solve it.
Try them on like clothes. Do they fit? Don’t force your speech into something that is too tight or unnatural.
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Vocalise, don’t memorise
Once you have found a broad structure that might fit, use it to think through what you want to say or if you prefer, write something down. The advantage of thinking is that it is harder to remember everything you want to say, and it forces you into establishing a natural structure. Maybe as you think through the first section, you keep forgetting a story you wanted to include. Does that mean the story is not as relevant as you thought? Does the thought process flow better without the story, or does it fit better later on?
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Think it through regularly
At this stage, don’t get too bogged down in individual words or precise details. Are you able in your mind to ‘walk through’ the overall structure of the presentation? If the structure makes sense, you will find it will settle and become easier to remember. If it does not feel natural, it will be a struggle to keep the flow, which may force you into a more natural arrangement.
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Add detail
That might be individual stories, statistics, case studies and then, gradually, adding neat turns of phrase that are easy to remember. Referring back to our Peterborough analogy: if we have established the three sections of the journey as:
- home to the station
- train to Peterborough
- station to venue
Now, within that scheme, we are deciding whether the best way to the station is by foot, bus or taxi.
And if we are going by foot, we might decide to take a taxi from the station to the venue.
Are we going to eat our sandwiches on the way to the station or on the train?
So one section’s content might influence how we approach another section.
(And although we have never been to Peterborough before, we did recently go to Cambridge, so a similar approach might be a good way to start.)
By ‘walking’ the journey a few times in our head, we will gradually find the easiest, most logical way of organising and balancing the individual elements.
Some schemes of remembering
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Walking through a landscape
A popular technique of the ancient world was to imagine a speech broken into sections and then to imagine those sections associated with different parts of a house: the introduction is in the porch, leading to an overview of the topic in the hall, followed by the first idea in the living room, etc. It can obviously be any visual reminder that helps you to visualise and therefore remember the sequence.
If I use travelling up to Peterborough as my memory aid,
the decision to ‘investigate’ the problem could be the process of starting out and deciding to leave the house,
the early struggles could be the uphill walk to the station,
the benefit of modern technology could be the train journey that gets us there quickly….etc
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An acronym
The motivational speaker’s favourite!
(I might have heard a few too many of these.)
For example, a speaker might say
‘The key to a fully fulfilled life can be mapped to the word ‘SUCCESS’
S stands for – ‘set your goals’
U stands for - ‘understand your strengths
C stands for – ‘commit to do the work’
C stands for – ‘continue even when it is tough’…etc
This is a good technique for embedding a series of ideas in the listener’s mind, as they can use the same memory aid as the speaker.
However, you can always keep the word to yourself and use it as your private way of remembering your points.
I have a talk on the seven key ingredients for successful public speaking that map out to the letters of the word SPEAKER.
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Stories
Words are hard to remember, stories are not, because captured in a story:
a chronological or logical sequence
- visual anchors to help memory (yours and the audience’s)
- a narrative that leads you through the details of the story
- and if it is part of your own story, you automatically have:
credibility (it is your story), a unique perspective (no one else’s story)and an experience that the audience can relate to (a common story)
Bear in mind that most TED talks are:
Tell a story and make a point
And there is a reason we have been telling stories since we could articulate, because they are:
easy to remember, easy to deliver, easy to relate to.
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Pay attention to the transitions
If you have divided your presentation up into sections and you have taken the opportunity to vocalise your way through an individual section, as you prepare for your presentation, make sure you are very clear on what set of words or images is going to lead you from one section to the next.
I have seen many speeches falter because the speaker could not work out how to get from one idea to the next. So pay extra attention to the joins!
In short
Begin with the end in mind
Allow the speech to reveal its own best simple structure
Start to add detail to each section
Walk through it regularly
Keep focused on the key messages
and remember
Most of the individual words are not that important – the ideas are!
