Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about memorizing speeches. When deciding whether to read my manuscript or to memorize it, I work through those four questions. How long is the speech, how important is the phrasing, how will a manuscript affect the performance, and can I actually memorize this? So what this means is, is that I generally memorize stuff that's shorter, where the phrasing is really precise and important, and where the manuscript would kind of kill the mood. And for me that ends up being intro speeches, award speeches, media interviews. These are times where my comments need to look like their emerging from an interpersonal encounter, like in an interview. Or where my relationship to the subject is on display, stuff like weddings, eulogies, presenting an award, so on and so forth. But memories always present, hour long talk or 30 second television response, I want it in my memory. You should be memorizing every speech, the difference is simply the level of precision, right? I want to know an hour long talk very deeply. So much so, that I can avoid using notes or at least use them minimally. Now what I've memorized in those cases, is the structure, the outline, and a couple of key lines. Maybe 75% of those talks are extemporized, but I know what I want to say, but the words are going to be generated in that moment of speaking. Now, I want to know a four minute award speech, probably almost verbatim. Maybe there, maybe only 10% of the talk is extemporized. But that's to say it's not like there's memory over here and simply reading speeches over here, [SOUND], it's all memory. And in fact the Roman rhetorician Quintilian called memory the treasure house of eloquence. So even if you're reading a manuscript you should have a deep understanding and knowledge of that speech, why? Because your memory allows you to focus on that audience at that moment, right? Your memory enables your eloquence. And this approach to memory anchoring a good performance is true for lots of arts. Musicians, actors, okay they all have to memorize, and they seem to be pretty unified in their advice, memory is much easier if it has a context. So for example Arthur Rubenstein was a famous classical pianist, and he held massively complex pieces of music in his formidable memory. When he was asked how he memorized, he responded, the goal isn't to memorize a piece, but to know where the tune is going. So in general, memory techniques depend on having a meaningful context. We can see this in lots of life events, let's say your hiking. The path that you're on has lots of trails branching off of it, so every few minutes, you gotta decide, right or left, right or left. If you had 20 decisions, and you had to memorize a path, that might be kind of tough. But it would be a lot of easier if you knew that you generally wanted to be heading west, right? That's a context, it makes that memory easier. And when people talk about that moment when you forget everything, and I've seen it, it is awful. But if you can forget everything, you probably prepared in kind of the wrong way, right? Those people memorize decision by decision, they memorize line by line. So that when they forget a line, everything comes crashing down. If you know where you're heading, you won't necessarily remember each and every thing, but it's going to be a lot easier to get back on the right path. So we'll talk about some memory techniques in the next few lectures. But I do want to focus right now on one of the biggest pitfalls with memorized speeches, and for me, it's that sound of unnatural prosody, right? So when we speak naturally, our pitch rises and falls, our rate increases and decreases. But when reciting memorized material, people often fall back on that unnatural sounding tone of voice, it sounds plastic. Think of the flight attendant who's giving the plane safety briefing like a 1,000 times, right, that doesn't sound natural. So how do we avoid this? Well, practice is one of the key ways. You need a good baseline memory of the speech, so you can focus on sounding good in that moment. If you're struggling to remember each and every word, well that's where your mental focus is going to be, and the prosody's probably going to flatten out. So with speeches, even memorized one, I'll only aim for probably 80 to 90% memorized at most. So what that means is, I still need to be focused on crafting sentences in that moment, like I would be in a conversation. Another thing you can do is plan in some impromptu moments. So these would be places where you just know you're going to go off script. So maybe you're doing a wedding speech, and you know that after the introduction, you're just going to see and highlight some of the people in the audience, okay? That's a planned, unscripted moment. A few of those moments peppered into your speech, can help you retain that sense of natural sounding prosody. And that's important, because overall our goal is using memory to aid a great performance. Our goal isn't memorization, our goal is a good speech. So I'll typically push really hard for memorization, getting the logic down first, and then getting into greater and greater levels of precision. But then, when the speech comes, it's all about that moment, about that performance. If the performance doesn't match up exactly with what I had in my manuscript, that's not only fine, that's probably good. [MUSIC]
