Overview of memorization

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En provenance du cours de University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

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University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

25 notes

Cours 4 sur 4 dans Specialization Dynamic Public Speaking

The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience. This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course, you should be able to compose and deliver moving speeches that praise core audience values through evidence, storytelling, and humor. You should be able to write eloquent passages in tones appropriate to the audience and occasion and speak fluidly from either a well-prepared manuscript or from memory. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

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Week 4. Remembering and delivering a great speech.

You have your manuscript, now let’s perform it. Memory and delivery are clearly linked. We need to decide whether we’ll extemporize the speech, work from a manuscript, or memorize the whole thing. No one approach is inherently better, but should be a good response to the rhetorical situation. We’ll talk about making this decision. Now we can finally get into some humor work. Some of this is certainly invention, but a lot of it is delivery. We’ll think about where and how to insert some humor into our speeches. And just as important, what to do when a joke falls flat. We’ll wrap up with some general delivery and performance issues. The assignment this week is a speech analysis. You’ll watch a speech, write up some feedback, and read how others analyzed the speech.

Should I read my manuscript or memorize it?5:03

Overview of memorization5:33

Memory techniques4:39

Memorization process4:59

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr. Matt McGarrity
Principal Lecturer
UW Department of Communication

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]

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