Many speakers come to me with a written text that they plan and hope to memorize. The first thing I do is take away the script and ask them to give me the talk right then and there without notes. Off the top of their head. I want to break up that love affair with their text as soon as possible. A memorized talk can be a barrier between the speaker and audience; the speaker’s focus remains on themselves and their text, remembering or forgetting certain lines and phrases. We then begin the work of deconstructing the talk back to what inspired it, reconnecting with its purpose and rhythms to get the speaker back to a sense of aliveness in delivery.

Exceptions to the Rule

Once in a great while, there are talks which invite or even demand word-for-word memorization. These talks are crafted, each word chosen, phrase-by-phrase, the words creating a melody. Maybe the speaker is a poet or spoken-word performer. Maybe the speaker is a writer who knows that the truest way to share what they’ve found, seen, felt, is with this exact language, punctuation, and orchestration; the exact word is the only word.

In these rare cases, the speaker spends weeks, hours, days, reciting until… Read on.