How to memorise a talk fast and effectively

Taking inspiration from a small bird in a tree

When I was younger, I played guitar to a reasonably high standard. Back then, I had loads of pieces memorised and ready to perform, from acoustic jazz to fiddly electric solos. But over time, I gradually played less and less, which meant I remembered less too.

Now all I have left are some of the easier pieces, and only through muscle memory at that. I can usually start them, but if there’s any distraction or pause along the way, I am suddenly lost.

It turns out that half-memorised is a dangerous place to be. And not just for musical instruments.

From strumming to speaking

Last weekend I gave a talk at TEDxLondon about proof, science and trust, to a sold-out audience at Hackney Empire. Because London is one of the bigger TEDx events, the talks were carefully scripted, just like the main TED-organised conferences. In the run up, I went through several rounds of script edits, as well as a couple of rehearsals. Which meant I’d have to get through the risky territory that comes between writing a script and successfully delivering it.

A few years ago, Tim Urban wrote a really useful post about his experience of doing a TED talk. He outlined three levels of a scripted talk:

1. Read off a script (boring)

2. Recite a barely memorised talk (dangerous)

3. Memorise it to the level you’ve memorised how to sing ‘Happy Birthday’

As Urban put it:

“The people at TED refer to two tests you need to pass to qualify as Happy-Birthday-level memorized:

1. If you record yourself saying the talk and play it back at 2x speed, can you say it out loud while it’s playing and stay ahead of the recording?

2. Can you recite the talk with no problem while simultaneously doing an unrelated task that requires attention, like following a recipe and measuring out the ingredients into a bowl?”

How to memorise something to Happy-Birthday-level

I had a near-final version of my TEDx script by mid-December, which gave me about a month to fully learn it. (I’ve had a similar timeline for the other talks I’ve given at TED events over the years.)

So, how do you go about memorising something to that level without having to put in a massive amount of effort?

Short answer: you can’t. But there are some tricks I’ve found that can speed the process up, so it just takes lots of effort rather than an impossible amount. In developing these techniques, I’ve taken inspiration from another famous song: The Twelve Days of Christmas.

In the song, there are 364 objects gifted in total (and I’ve written before about the neat maths behind this). Because the gifts are repeated each time, it’s easier to learn incrementally without just trying to recite the final full list again and again, right down to the partridge in the pear tree. This would explain why my three-year-old loved reading/singing it so much at bedtime over Christmas week last December. And why, 2,548 objects later, I had the list memorised to happy-birthday-level.

Which brings us back to memorising a speech. Whenever I have to learn a talk, I usually go sentence-by-sentence to build up each paragraph, then paragraph-by-paragraph to build up each section of the talk, then section-by-section to build up the full talk. I typically take an approach like the following:

1. Read 1st sentence out loud 3 times from the script, then 3 times without the script (checking if needed).

2. Read 1st sentence again without script, followed by second sentence 3 times with script, then 3 times without.

3. Continue until paragraph memorised, then move on to memorise next paragraph, then go back and link paragraphs together.

I’ve found this is more effective than trying to repeatedly rehearse the whole talk start-to-finish, because: 1) it avoids the frustration of having to start afresh every time after inevitably messing up a middle section; 2) it avoids over-rehearsing the start of the talk, allowing each section to be thoroughly worked on.

In particular, I’ve found that if I’m struggling to memorise a section, it often means that either a section doesn’t work logically, or I’ve got a script with words that are too much my ‘writing voice’ rather than my actual voice.

From memory to delivery

Of course, memorising a talk is only part of it. The next step is delivery. Like writing computer code, I’ve found it’s easier to polish something that’s working than to try and fix a polished – but malfunctioning – output. So once it’s memorised and working, the next job is to refine the pacing, emotion, mannerisms, and movement.

I find stand-up comedians a useful example here. Often they will have rehearsed a story so many times that it now seems off-the-cuff – and yet usually every pause, every expression, will have been carefully refined and tweaked to maximise the impact on the audience.

For me, laughter can also be one of the biggest dangers. If an audience find a line funnier than I expect, or laugh for longer than anticipawhich ted, it can throw the rhythm of the talk. But, like an interrupted rendition of Happy Birthday, a well-memorised talk means it’s possible to take a pause, reset the pace and keep the party going.

---

My new book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty is available to pre-order now.