People who try to memorise a speech usually start by learning it word for word. That is the hardest way to do it and the most fragile: lose one sentence and the rest of the script goes with it, and the audience can hear that you are reciting.
The orators' approach is different. You memorise the order of the ideas, not the words, and let yourself find the words fresh each time.
Step 1: reduce the talk to its points
Write the speech out if that helps you think, then boil it down to a list of points in order - one line each. A ten-minute talk usually has eight to fifteen. Each point should be something you could speak about for a minute without prompting.
- Welcome, and how I know the couple
- The camping trip where they met
- The disastrous first dinner
- ...
If a point needs an exact phrase - a quote, a statistic, a punchline - mark it. Those few lines are worth learning word for word. Everything else is not.
Step 2: one image per point
Turn each point into a single concrete picture that will pull the whole point back. The camping trip is a collapsing tent. The disastrous dinner is a flaming saucepan. A statistic can be turned into an image with the Major System.
Make the images big, moving and a little absurd - the same rules as for any memory palace image.
Step 3: place them along a route
Pick a route you know perfectly: your home, your walk to work, or a palace you already use. Put one image at each stop, in the order of the talk. The collapsing tent is on the front door. The flaming saucepan is on the coat hooks. And so on.
Now the structure of the talk is the structure of the route. You cannot skip a point without noticing an empty stop, and you always know what comes next.
Step 4: rehearse by walking and speaking
Walk the route in your head and speak each point aloud as you reach it, in whatever words come. Do it three or four times over two or three days, not twenty times the night before. Each time the wording will be a little different and a little better, and that is fine - it will sound like you talking rather than you reading.
Rehearse the marked exact lines separately until they are word-perfect, and give each one a distinctive detail in its image so you know it is coming.
On the day
- Walk the route once, silently, before you stand up.
- If you blank, do not reach for the words. Go back to the stop and look at the image; the point will come with it.
- If you skip ahead by accident, the route tells you: an empty stop behind you is a point you can still make.
- Keep one card in your pocket with the list of points, as insurance. Knowing it is there is often enough that you never need it.
Why this works so well for talks
A speech is an ordered list of ideas, each rich enough to talk about - exactly what the memory palace was built for. Cicero and Quintilian describe orators placing the parts of a speech in the rooms of a house and walking through them as they spoke. It is often said that the phrase "in the first place" is an echo of that practice.
If the technique is new to you, practise it first with simple lists until placing and walking feel automatic. Memory Palace for Apple TV is designed for exactly that: guided walks through five 4K palaces, with a recall test that checks you know what was at each stop, not just that you saw it.