Public Speaking Tips for Memory
The old joke goes:
‘My memory is perfect; I just struggle with recall.’
It is all in there; it is just hard to access when you need it.
You probably do not want to memorise your speeches in the first place, as that tends to make your delivery stiff and robotic.
So if the struggle is reliably accessing memory, we just need to find a way to recall the key elements as and when we need them.
There used to be a television programme in the 1970s called the Generation Game, which ended with a series of prizes on a conveyor belt passing in front of the winning contestant, and everything that the contestant could remember, they could keep.
You may also remember a school memory game where the first student started with the words:
‘I went to the shop and bought…’
The next student would repeat and then add an item
Each successive student would try to remember everything that had already been said and then add a further item, until the list got too long for the next student to remember.
If you approach a speech like that, you will quickly become overwhelmed, especially with the extreme pressure of having to remember when there is a room full of people in front of you.
This is why most people will resort to writing their speech out in full and reading it aloud, or otherwise relying on too many over-worded slides, which they also read out, creating the double offence of not just reading their presentation but further insulting the audience by reading out what the audience are perfectly capable of reading for themselves.
If you want to be sure of every word then writing out the speech in full and then reading it will guarantee nothing will be left out, but all fluidity and flexibility will be lost, as will much of the speaker’s authority as well as their ability to connect with the people they are speaking to.
In this article, rather than focusing on how to design and use notes, I would like to go to the other extreme of imagining a situation where we would aim to speak freely without any aids or technical support.
A friend told me recently about a piano pupil who was offered a piece to learn by his new teacher.
The pupil objected, wanting a more challenging piece.
They started on the new piece, but it was clearly too hard; they tried one a little less challenging, still too hard, and eventually went back even beyond the piece that the teacher had originally offered, as even that was beyond the level of the student.
The pupil had come with a very false idea of their own ability, and every good teacher will know that if the technical challenge is too great, it can become demoralising, it may also ingrain tensions and strains, and create bad habits that will be hard to unlearn later on.
So if you feel you are at a level where you only feel safe with a full script, please don’t suddenly try to speak without any notes at all. Take it a step at a time. Can you at least start the presentation without notes, even if that is only to plan how you are going to welcome the audience and start the speech?
Below are steps and techniques that can be added gradually.
10 tips to aid memory
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Keep it Simple
If the concept of your speech cannot be captured in a nutshell statement, it is too complicated: too complicated for you to remember and therefore probably too complicated for your audience to follow.
When Donald Trump broadcast the message: ‘Build the Wall’ as the solution to most of America’s problems, even though the details and examples may have been more complex, he was able to boil it down to a simple, memorable phrase.
If you intend to deliver a speech on building self-esteem in young people, the subject might be so broad that you get lost on the way, whereas stressing the skill of ‘listening’ is more focused.
Socially, I am sure you have heard people talking on such a subject where,e after a few moments, they get lost, jump onto some half-related subject, and then stop saying:
‘I’ve lost my track.’
The track was too wide!
If the message is:
‘We need to listen more and instruct less.’
Then, when the speaker starts to go off track, it is much easier to find the way back:
‘I’ve lost my track – ah, yes – that is why we need to listen’
And then they can continue.
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Planned Spontaneity
The attitude of Planned Spontaneity is the first step to becoming free from notes.
We have a clear idea of our destination and a clear idea of two or three key points of examples we want to cover so that now if we find we need to spend more time on a concept that does not seem to make sense to the audience, or else skip through some material that turns out to be self-evident to the audience, we can diverge from the pathway for a few moments but we always know where we are and where we need to get back to.
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Three is the magic number
We have looked at the value of thinking and planning in threes in a previous blog
https://www.ataps.co.uk/about/blog/public-speaking-tips-for-the-power-of-three.html
Think of juggling three oranges.
With a bit of practice, you can probably manage
Four oranges are getting a bit hard
Arranging your ideas in threes (up to three) means you are less likely to be overwhelmed, and when you go into your memory, it will be easier to recall your ideas.
It follows on from Planned Spontaneity; if you only have three major sections or concepts, you might even find yourself ‘spontaneously’ jumping from Point 1 to Point 3, which means you know you just need to fill in with Point 2.
Having more than three ideas is when you might get confused.
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Pictures not Words
Trying to remember too many words will overwhelm you.
Having been speaking freely for many years, I learned something when I went back to commit a verse to memory: it was very hard!
Learning word for word is like memorising street directions: left, right, second exit etc.
You just need to get one small direction wrong, and you are lost.
‘Keep going until you get to McDonald's, or turn right when you reach the park’ is much easier to follow.
‘Build the wall’ is a very effective slogan.
It is simple, easy to remember, and I can ‘see’ a wall in my mind’s eye.
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Stories
Telling stories, apart from being the most natural form of communication and the most effective form of education, is also the simplest way of creating pictures.
I want to make the point that we need to listen to young people; all I need are some story examples of how being listened to really helped me, or when not being listened to did not!
Most TED talks are based on stories:
‘This is my point, and here is my personal experience to reinforce that point.’
Nothing needs to be written out word for word, because the point is clear and the story comes directly from the speaker’s experience.
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Key words
One of my favourite pieces of poetry is from TS Eliot:
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’
(My bold emphasis)
It was a real struggle memorising that.
One reason is that there are no clear pictures.
The words are beautiful and profound, but the imagery is slightly hazy and tending to the abstract.
Therefore, one way of helping myself was to focus on the key words in each line (the ones I have put in bold).
Therefore, as long as I can retain: cease, end, arrive, know, I have a structure to build around.
Taking this one stage further in delivering a speech rather than memorising a precise quote, if I want to put that idea across in a speech, I would focus on those four words and use them as part of a ‘planned spontaneous’ presentation, so I could say:
‘ In the end, in our lives, we are never going to cease searching, learning, and finding things out
But we will probably find that at the end of all this searching
that we somehow find ourselves right back at the beginning, like we have arrived back where we started from
and because of everything we have learnt and experienced in our lives, we will know and be somehow familiar with that place even though we think it was the first time we had ever been there.’
I do not need to remember all those words. In this example I have written them out in a way that is more like how one speaks than how one writes, but in my speech I just need to be able to move from key word to key word and allow the overall point I want to make lead me through, and as I am looking at my audience if I find that part of that does not appear to make sense, I can see that and repeat the thought in another way, or use an example or an analogy.
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Patterns
I have my four key words: cease, end, arrive, know.
As I have already suggested, they are a bit abstract; they do not provide a clear picture.
Therefore, I might create a simple visual image for myself to make them easier to remember.
I might think of a horse and carriage journey and picture the moment of arrival:
The horses cease trotting, it is the end of the journey, we have arrived, I get out and think ‘I know where I am’
Imagine in am introducing someone and I want to introduce their hobbies, which are:
cooking, hiking, and classical music.
I might create a picture for myself of them in hiking gear, halfway up a mountain, stopping to cook on a camping stove and singing Mozart as they are stirring their dinner.
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Acronyms
Much teaching is built around using simple acronyms.
The ABC for being a better listener:
Ask Questions
Be attentive to the Answer
Concentrate
When working with school children, I found that many of the football fans in the room were aware of the Dutch team PSV Eindhoven, so I would tell them the best stories to use when Public Speaking were:
Personal
Simple
Visual
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Alliteration
Apart from sounding neat, alliteration is an excellent way of organising your thoughts, as rather than having to remember three otherwise unconnected ideas, you can arrange it so that they all start with the same letter. When explaining the benefits of taking lessons in Public Speaking, I would explain that it will have a positive effect on three levels: personal, professional, and practical.
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Structure and Signposting
Rather than getting immediately lost in the detail, can you draw back and look down on the broad structure of the presentation – and do this regularly before you need to speak, so that before you practise your delivery, stand back and make sure that you can quickly recite the key sections of the presentation and once they are clear to you, you can use that to gather yourself and your audience during the actual presentation by signposting your progress to your audience:
‘We have just looked at A, so what I want to do now is to look at B……..and so having looked at A, B and C, I would like to conclude…’
