9 - How To Remember Speeches, Jokes, Books, Poems, Dramatic Parts And Articles
Speeches
The best way to start approaching the memorisation of speeches is to realise that in 90 per cent of cases they do not need to be completely memorised. Realisation of this fact will instantaneously help you overcome most of the major problems experienced by those who approach speech writing and speech making as memory function:
The secret of making a good speech is not to remember the entire speech word for word, but the main Key Words of your speech. The entire process of preparation and memory/presentation can be made both enjoyable and easy if you follow these simple steps:
1. Generally research the topic about which you are going to speak, making recordings of ideas, quotations and references that you think will prove relevant.
2. Having completed your basic research, sit down and plan out, using a Mind Map, the basic structure of your presentation.
3. With your basic structure in front of you, fill in any important details, still in Mind Map form, so that you have completed a left and right brain, associative, imagistic Mind Map Memory Note of the entire speech. Usually this will contain no more than 100 words.
4. Practise making your speech from this completed outline. You will find that, as you practise, the final order in which you wish to present the speech will become increasingly clear, and you can number the main areas and subtitles of your speech appropriately. You will also find that, having completed the research and thought in this way about the structure of the material, you will already have automatically memorised the bulk of your speech.
Initially, of course, there will be points in it at which you will hesitate or get lost, but with a little practice you will find that you not only know your speech from beginning to end but know, at a much deeper level than most speakers, the real associations, connections and deeper structures of your speech.
In other words, you will really know what you are talking about. This point is especially important, for it means that when you finally do speak to your audience, you will have no fear of forgetting the word order of what you are presenting. You will simply say what you have to say smoothly, using the vocabulary appropriate for the moment and not getting bogged down in a rigid succession of preordained sentence structures. You will thus become a creative and dynamic speaker.
5. Select the ten, twenty or thirty Key Words that completely summarize your speech and use the Basic Memory Principles to connect your speech. Don't worry about any little pauses that might occur in your speech. When an audience senses that a speaker knows what he or she is talking about, a pause is actually more positive than negative, for it makes it obvious to the audience that the speaker is actually thinking and creating on the platform. This adds to the enjoyment of listening, for it makes the presentation far less formal and more personal and natural. Some great speakers actually use the pause as a technique, maintaining electrifying 'thinking silences' of up to as much as a full minute.
In those very rare instances when you do have to memorise an entire speech word for word, the process can be made easy by applying everything discussed so far in relation to speeches, and then, for the finishing touches, applying the techniques outlined in Dramatic Parts and Poems in this chapter.
Jokes
The problems and embarrassments associated with the memorisation and the telling of jokes are almost endless. In recent studies of business people and students, it was found that of the thousands of people questioned, nearly 80 per cent thought of themselves as not particularly good joke tellers, all wanted to be good joke tellers, and all listed memory as their major obstacle. The memorisation of jokes is actually far easier to deal with than the memorisation of speeches because the entire creative aspect of the work has already been done for you. The solution is in two parts: first, to establish a basic grid to categorise and capture the main element of the joke; and second, to remember the main details.
The first of these areas is easily dealt with by using a section of the Major System as a permanent library for the jokes you wish to file. First, divide the kind of jokes you wish to tell into general categories. For example:
Sexual jokes
Animal jokes
National jokes (Irish, Japanese, etc.)
Rhyming jokes
Toilet jokes
Kids' jokes
'Intellectual' jokes
'Saying' jokes
Sport jokes, etc.
List them in numerical preference order and then devote sections of your Major System to these categories. For example, you might have the area from 1 to 10 or 1 to 20 for sexual jokes, the numbers from 10 to 20 or 20 to 40 for national jokes, and so on.
The second area is equally easy to handle. Let us take, for example, the joke about the man who went into a pub and bought a pint of beer. Having been given his beer, he suddenly realised he had to make an urgent telephone call, but he knew that some of the characters in the pub would swipe his pint before he returned. In order to prevent this, he wrote on the glass, 'I am the world's karate champion', and went to make his telephone call, securely thinking that his beer was safe. When he returned, he immediately saw that his glass was empty, and he noticed more scribbling underneath his own. It read: Thanks for the pint — the world's fastest runner!'
To remember the joke, you consciously select Major Key Words from it, joining them to form the basic narrative. All you need from this entire joke are the Key Memory Words: 'pint', 'phone', 'karate champion' and 'running champion'.
To complete your memorisation, you imaginatively link the first Key Word to the appropriate Key Word in the Major System, and you use the Link System to connect the remaining three Key Memory Words. There are two major advantages to using this system: first, you will be able to remember clearly and categorise whatever jokes you wish; and second, the mass involvement of your right brain in the memorisation of the joke itself will make you a far more creative and imaginative joke teller, thus overcoming the second major problem for jokers, that of getting in a too rigid and linear, leftbrained memorisation mode, which bores the listener.
Dramatic Parts and Poems
For the university student, school child and professional or amateur actor, this aspect of memory can be the most troublesome of all. The method usually recommended and employed is to read a line over and over again, 'get it'; read the next line, 'get it'; join the two together, 'get them'; read the next line and so on and so on ad nauseam until the first lines have been forgotten.
Systems based on the Memory Principles and used successfully by famous actors and actresses are the reverse. In this system the material to be remembered is read and reread quickly (see Speed Reading) and with understanding over a period of four days, approximately five to ten times per day. If you read for understanding continually in this way, you will become far more familiar with the material than you realise at the end of the twentieth reading, and you will be able to recall, without looking at the text, most of the material to be remembered. Your mind, especially if you have used your right-brain imagination to help you understand, will have absorbed practically 90 per cent of the information, and remembering will have become a natural outgrowth of proper reading and basic understanding using the tools of imagination and association.
This system is far more successful than the line-by-line repetition system, and it can be improved upon even further in the following way: once again you use Key Memory Words. For example, if the material to be remembered is poetry, a few Major Key Words will help your mind 'fill in' the remaining word-gaps. If the material to be remembered is part of a script, once again the Key Memory Image Words and Link Systems prove essential.
The basic subdivisions of a long speech can be strung together with Key-Word ease, and cues from speaker to speaker can be handled far more effectively if you imaginatively mnemonicise the quantum leap between the previous speaker's last word and your next word. It is lack of the use of these mnemonic techniques that often cause chaos on the stage, especially those long silences and breaks in continuity that occur when one performer forgets his last word or another forgets his first. Acting troupes can save as much as 50 per cent of their time, and thus enormously reduce stress and increase enjoyment and efficiency, but applying the Basic Memory Principles to the theatrical works in which they are involved.
Articles
You may need to remember the content of articles on a short-term or long-term basis, and the systems for remembering each are different. If you have to attend a meeting or make a brief resume of an article you have only recently read, you can remember it almost totally, and at the same time can astound your listeners, by remembering the pages to which you are referring. The method is simple: take one, two or three Key Memory Image Words from each page of the article and slot them on to one of your basic Memory Systems. If there is only one Key Memory Image Word per page, you will know that when you are down to Key Memory Image Word number five in your system, you are referring to the fifth page of the article, whereas if there are two ideas per page and you are at Memory Word seven, you will know you are at the top of page four.
For the memorisation of an article over a long period of time, it will be necessary for you to choose more than two or three Key Memory Image Words per page.
Books
It is possible to memorise, in detail, an entire book! You simply apply the memory techniques for articles to each page of the book you wish to remember. Simply take one, two or three Key Memory Image Words for page one and creatively link them to your Major System Memory Word for number 1: tea. From page two you select another one, two or three Key Memory Image Words, creatively linking them to your number 2 Major System Key Memory Word: Noah, and so on. It will thus be possible for you, in a 300-page book, to remember not only what the basic content of each page was but, if you wish, what each section of each page contained. You need no longer fear examinations:
The common scenario suggested above applies not only to those who know little about the subject but often to those who have a great deal of knowledge. I remember at least three students in my undergraduate years who knew more about certain subjects than practically everyone else in the year and who consequently used to give private tutoring and coaching to those who were struggling.
Extraordinarily, these bright students would regularly fail to excel at examination time, invariably complaining that they had not had enough time in the examination room to gather together the mass of knowledge that they had and that for some reason they 'forgot' at critical moments.
All these problems can be overcome by preparing for examinations using the techniques for reading and studying outlined in Use Your Head and Speed Reading. Assume, for example, that the subject you wish to study and prepare to be examined in is psychology. As you study and organise your notes throughout the year, you would consciously and continually build up categories (much as you did when remembering jokes) that contain all the sub categories of the information.
In psychology these categories might include the following:
Using the major System you would allot a certain section to each of these major headings, attaching the Key Memory Image Words from your subjects to the appropriate Major System or Key Memory Image Word. For example, if you had devoted the numbers 30 to 50 to important psychological experiments, and the fifth of these was an experiment by the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner in which pigeons learned to peck for the reward of grain, you would imagine an enormous suit of armour (mail) taking the place of the skin (Skinner) of a giant and warrior like pigeon who was pecking at the sun, causing millions of tons of grain to pour from heaven.
Using this approach, you will find it possible to contain an entire year's study within the numbers 1 to 100 and to transmit this organised and well-understood knowledge into flowing, first-class examination papers. If, for example, you were asked, in your psychology exam, to discuss motivation and learning with reference to behavioural psychology, you would pick the Key Words from the question and run them down your Major System Memory Grid, pulling out any items that were in any way relevant to the question. Thus, the general form of your opening paragraph might be as follows:
In discussing the question of 'motivation and learning with reference to behavioural psychology', I wish to consider the following main areas of psychology: blank, blank and blank; the following give theories: blank, blank and blank; the following three experiments, which support hypothesis A: blank, blank and blank; the following two experiments, which support hypothesis B: blank and blank; and the following five experiments, which support hypothesis C: blank, blank, blank, blank and blank.
In discussing the above, I wish to quote from the following books: blank, blank and blank; make reference to papers by blank, blank, blank, blank, blank and blank; include further references from course lectures given by blank on the following subjects: blank, blank, blank and blank; on the following dates: blank, blank, blank and blank.
As you can see, you are already well on the way to a good grade, and at this stage you are still breezing through the introduction to your answer) It is worth emphasising that in any subject area the last category in your Memory System should be for your own creative and original ideas. It is in this category that the difference between first-and second-class examination results lies.
Besides being able to remember information perfectly for examinations, by using the systems outlined in this book, you will also be cultivating the creative powers of your mind that lead to your complete success.
Remembering Mind Maps
Most people forget what they note because they use only a tiny fraction of their brain in the notetaking process. Standard notetaking systems use sentences, phrases, lists and lines, and numbers. Such systems use only the leftbrained Basic Memory Principles of order, sequence and number, leaving out imagination, association, exaggeration, contraction, absurdity, humour, colour, rhythm, the senses, sexuality and sensuality.
In order to make notes well, you have to break with tradition and use both the left and right sides of your brain, as well as all the fundamental Memory Principles. In this system of note taking, you use blank unlined pages, using a Key Memory Image (right brain) that summarises the central theme of the note you are making. From this central image you have a series of connecting lines (left brain) on which are written (left brain) or drawn (right brain) the Key Image Words or actual images themselves of the main sub-areas and sub-themes you wish to note. Connected to these lines are more lines, again on which you place Key Image Words or Key Images themselves. In this way you build up a multidimensional, associative, imaginative and colourful Mind Map Memory Note of everything you wish to note.
Noting in this way, you will not only remember almost immediately and totally everything you write down because of the application of all the Memory Principles to this new multidimensionally mnemonic notetaking approach but you will also find that the approach allows you to understand, analyse and think critically about whatever it is you are noting, while at the same time it gives you more time to pay attention to either the lecturer or the book from which you are learning.