Monthly Archives: January 2015

To Memorize or Not to Memorize?

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I have a personal bias against memorizing a presentation. As a high school student, I was involved in competitive speaking in the category of Oratorical Declamation. Each contestant had to memorize a section of a famous speech and deliver it before a group of judges. I chose Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech given in Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1775. I spent many hours memorizing the last portion of the speech. Then in the middle of delivering it at the contest, I had a mental block and could not finish the speech. I was mortified and angry because I had invested so much time in memorizing it.

So I generally avoid memorizing my presentations. I tell my seminar participants and students the same: don’t memorize your presentation. Speaking from notes will help your delivery to be much more natural and effective.

However, as is the case with most general rules, there are exceptions. Certain parts of a speech will usually make your speech more effective if they are memorized. Here are a few suggestions.

Memorize the opening lines of your presentation. Your language will be specific and concrete to insure that the audience will listen to you. When you get off to a good start, your nervousness lessens and you are on your way to a successful presentation.

Memorize a joke or humorous story you are going to tell. Reading a joke simply does not work. You need to be able to interact with the audience nonverbally as you deliver humor. With a short piece of entertaining material, practice it until it does not sound memorized. Family and friends provide good practice audiences for humorous stories.

In a persuasive speech, memorize the “move to action” step. You should know exactly what you want your audience to do as a result of your presentation. In fact, end with “What I want you to do as a result of my presentation is….” Know those words by heart. You must have confidence in your conclusion and make eye contact with your audience as you deliver this final thought.

Sometimes you should memorize transitions. If you have an abrupt change of direction in the middle of your presentation, you might choose to memorize the transition leading to your next point. Thus the audience will receive proper direction and not be confused.

For example, in my “Be Present When You are Present” speech I need to transition from giving statistics about paying attention to using a historical narrative to illustrate how animals have a sixth sense that helps them pay attention to danger. I use this transitional statement: “You remember the tsunami at the end of 2004 when thousands of people lost their lives in Asian countries….” Exact wording here is crucial to lead into my point. I have memorized this sentence.

Only under rare circumstances do I recommend memorizing any part of a speech; the above suggestions, however, should make you aware of possibilities for enhancing your effectiveness as a speaker.

Connecting on a Cruise

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My wife and I usually take a winter cruise to enjoy warm weather instead of suffering in the frigid Midwest. The experience, however, is also an education. We have taken classes on folding napkins and taken a tour of the kitchen area where thousands of meals are prepared every day, as well as learning from a chef how to prepare seafood.

But because we signed up this time for My Time Dining, we sat with different people at most meals. You might think this is an uncomfortable way to select meal partners—complete strangers sharing a meal—but not necessarily. At breakfast one morning this week we were seated with nine people whom we had never met before. When we first sat down, all seemed to bury their faces in the menu to avoid contact with the rest of us.

Since teaching and training in communication have been my life’s work, I saw this situation as a special challenge to help everyone get comfortable. I began by looking out over the group and asking the general question, “Where are you all from?” All were from Mississippi and Texas and were made up of three different families. That began a good conversation on careers, sports interests, and family connections.

In the course of the meal I learned that one man, a steel worker, had created the mold to make McDonald’s McRIBS. Another had three engineering degrees and was very much involved with building drones for a Department of Defense contractor. A retired 80-year-old farmer had just sold several beef cattle for the highest price he’d ever gotten. (No wonder beef is expensive in the meat department of our local grocery store!)

This kind of education you will not find in a book, but you can get it by having a meal and connecting with a group of strangers you will never see again. I will forget the songs the performers sang in the theatre that night, but I will remember our breakfast companions for a long time. You don’t have to be on a cruise to strike up a conversation with the person you happen to be sitting by. In so doing, you will continue to be a student.

Personal Experiences: Two Ways to Win

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If you have read my story blog at sboyd.com/speaker stories, you know that I believe that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence in a presentation is the personal experience.

But there is another benefit that goes beyond delivering an effective presentation. That is chronicling family history. If you have several personal experiences to draw from in your presentations, you also have a concise summary of some of your family history.

For example, my daughter’s birth mother died last week. With the mother’s death, no one in this western state knew of our daughter’s existence. With Facebook help, she was able to contact a close friend of her birth mother’s. Because of the personal nature of the information the birth mother had given her, it was easy to prove that she was that woman’s birth daughter. She found through this person two other friends and began to email them as they all planned to get together at the memorial service.

In the meantime, my wife and I also connected with these special people. I chose to share with these new friends the story I have told in many of my speeches over the past fifteen years about how my daughter found her birth parents when she turned 18. As I reviewed the script of the story, I realized I had covered my daughter’s first 22 years of life as it related to her birth parents in two and one half minutes.

I had worked for months in developing the story. The major problem was how to condense such an extensive story. But after many revisions, I had the story limited to a bit over a two-minute narrative.

I discovered, in thinking about the story and other personal examples I tell in my speeches, that I had a pretty concise personal history of major events in my life. The story of the first time I, age 42, told my father I loved him is powerful and effective with audiences, but it is also a piece of my family history. Without the motivation of developing these powerful stories for specific speeches, I would never have the narratives in script form.

Even if you develop a story and it does not fit a presentation, you still have a piece of your personal life that you can review—and later on your children and grandchildren can read it as well.

When preparing original support for your next presentation, think of a powerful event in your life that can have double benefit: support for an important point and recording a chunk of your family history.