Memorizing Your Piece

🕑 3 min.

For any speeches/performances that won’t be given extemporaneously (that is, for any platform speeches or interpretations), you’ll need to memorize your piece ahead of time. There are a variety of techniques for doing so, and figuring out which ones work best for you will require some experimentation on your part, as everyone’s a bit different. Here are some general recommendations.

Break It Up

A first step is taking the whole and breaking it up into smaller chunks. If you’re memorizing a speech, consider one paragraph at a time, but if it’s a play, consider one scene at a time, for instance, or perhaps break the scene into smaller chunks. Start with just the first chunk and work on it till you have it completely memorized. Once you’re good there, set it aside and move on to the second chunk. Work on that until you’re good there, and then put the first two chunks together. Work on them together until you’re confident you’ve got it, then move on to chunk number three, etc.

How do you memorize any given chunk? You do the same thing, but smaller: break the paragraph up into bite-size pieces. You’ll probably want to break at sentence boundaries (though not always), and you might want to break within sentences as well, depending on their length. Once you’ve subdivided your paragraph, start with the first phrase and memorize that. Once you’ve got it, move on to the second. When you’re good there, put the first and second together. When you’re comfortable with that, move on to the third phrase, etc.

Write It Out

Another tip for memorizing a piece is to write it out. If you’ve broken it up into bite-size pieces as mentioned above, then a suggestion would be to write each phrase on an index card (be sure you number them). Then you can use these as flash cards as you work on memorizing. The act of writing down the words engages more of your senses and helps to solidify the words into your memory. Additionally, as you go through your piece in your head, you’ll wind up having mental images of each card, so you’re not just remembering the words themselves, but also what they look like written on the page.

As you work your way through the piece, it can also help to write it out in abbreviated form using the first letters of every word. If I were memorizing Marc Antony’s eulogy in Shakepseare’s Julius Caesar, I would jot down on the page “FRclmyeIctbCntph,” in place of “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” While it doesn’t seem like much, engaging your tactile and visual senses in this way can help solidify things in your mind.

Record Yourself

A final recommendation would be to record yourself reciting the piece, and then play it back to yourself regularly. You may be tempted to think it would be just as good to listen to someone else’s recording of the same piece, but that likely won’t be as effective, as you’ll more easily slip from active into passive listening. Record yourself with the words in front of you. Listen to the recording, going through the words in your head. After you’ve done that for a while, record yourself again, and start listening to the new recording. At some point, transition to recording yourself speaking from memory instead of from the script.

Have Someone Feed You Lines

To test your memory of the piece, have someone feed you lines, and see if you can pick up where they leave off. In the beginning, your assistant should choose lines at the beginning of a paragraph or equivalent chunk of text. As you get better, they can pick some sentence in the middle of a paragraph. To really test your memory skills, they can start in the middle of a sentence. Be sure you keep this fun, though. If it starts to get stressful, take a break and come back to it later.