Memory palace for a speech or presentation: speak without notes

A memory palace lets you give a speech or presentation without reading from notes. You reduce the speech to its points, give each point one vivid image, and place the images in order along a route you know well. When you speak, you walk the route in your mind and say what you find in each room. This guide shows how, with a worked five-point talk, a birthday toast for a friend, a rehearsal schedule and what to do if you go blank.

New to the technique? Start with memory palace: how to build one, step by step.

The orators' technique

The memory palace was a speaker's tool from the start. The Roman orator Cicero tells its founding story, about the poet Simonides, in De oratore, a book about the ideal speaker. The oldest surviving manual of rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, treats memory as one of the parts of a speaker's craft and calls it the treasury of everything the speaker has found and the guardian of all the other parts.

The Roman teacher Quintilian, in his Institutio oratoria, describes how it worked. A speaker chose a large building with many rooms. He gave each part of the speech a sign, for example an anchor for a passage about sea travel or a weapon for a passage about war. He put the first thought in the entrance, the second in the hall, and went on past the rooms and the statues, in order. To recall the speech, he walked through the places from the beginning and asked each one for what he had left there.

Points, not words

Quintilian added a warning that still holds. The method, he wrote, is less useful for learning a continuous text by heart: if you need an image for every word, the double effort will block the flow of your speech. The Rhetorica ad Herennium makes the same distinction between images for the matter and images for the words.

So store the points in the palace and say them in your own words. Learn only a few lines word for word: the first sentence, a quotation, a promise or a vow. For a long text, Quintilian advises learning it in parts, which suits a palace with one room per part.

From outline to route, step by step

1. Write the outline. One line per point, in the order you will say them. Five to seven points for a short talk.
2. Give each point one image. Take the most concrete thing in the point: a person, an object, a number turned into something you can see. Make it large, moving and a little absurd.
3. Choose the route. Somewhere you know well, with as many clearly different spots as points. Your own route to work works, and so does our generator's villa.
4. Place the images. One per spot, interacting with it: jammed in the gate, hanging from the trees, spouting from the fountain.
5. Mark every fifth spot. The Rhetorica ad Herennium suggests putting something special on every fifth place, such as a golden hand on the fifth. In a long speech you then always know how far you are.
6. Rehearse aloud. Walk the route and speak each point in your own words. See the schedule below.

Worked examples

Both examples open in our generator, with each point on its own spot in the villa. Replace the points with your own and keep the images.

1. A five-point project update

A short talk at work about a new website. Five points, five spots, in the order you will say them.

1. Front gate: Opening: the customer who could not find our phone number
2. Cypress avenue: The goal: every answer within two clicks
3. Forecourt fountain: What we built
4. Front door: What went wrong: the launch was late
5. Entrance hall: What we need from you next

At the front gate, a giant phone is jammed between the bars, ringing, and nobody can reach it. In the cypress avenue, a computer mouse hangs from every tree and clicks twice. The fountain spouts the pages of the new website. A torn calendar page blocks the front door. On the plinth in the entrance hall stands an empty chair with a name card for each colleague: that is your request.

Open this palace in the generator

2. A birthday toast for a friend

Six beats for a toast at a friend's birthday dinner, so you can look at her and the guests instead of your phone.

1. Front gate: The day we met: the wrong train
2. Cypress avenue: The camping trip in the rain
3. Forecourt fountain: What she taught me about cooking
4. Front door: Always the first to call
5. Entrance hall: A wish for the year ahead
6. Grand staircase: Raise your glasses

A train squeezes backwards through the front gate. Dripping tents hang in the cypress trees. The fountain throws up her famous pasta. A ringing phone fills the whole front door. On the plinth, a wrapped present: your wish. Glasses stand on every step of the grand staircase. Fill each beat with one real detail only the two of you know.

Open this palace in the generator

A rehearsal schedule

• Write it by hand. Quintilian advised learning from the same tablets you wrote on. A handwritten outline is easier to picture than a slide.
• The day you build it: walk the route in silence, then say the speech aloud room by room.
• The next day: the whole speech aloud, start to finish, without notes. Only then check what you missed, and make that image stronger. Recalling before you look is what makes it stay.
• The days after: start from a random room and carry on from there. If you can start anywhere, a stumble will not stop you.
• The day before: once standing up, out loud, for one friend if you can.
• The morning itself: one quiet walk through the route.

If you go blank

• Pause. A pause feels long to you and normal to the audience.
• Go back one room. Return to the last spot you remember and walk forward. The next image is usually standing right there.
• Skip if you must. If a room stays empty, go to the next one. The audience does not know your order, and the missing point often comes back later.
• Keep a small card. Not the speech, just the names of the spots: gate, avenue, fountain. One glance is enough to find the route again.

Our free memory palace generator places up to 20 points on 20 spots in a villa, with a test at the end and a calendar reminder for your next rehearsal. It runs in your browser and nothing is stored on our side. To learn lists for school or work, see memory palace for studying.

After the toast come the photos, the recording of the speech and the stories people tell at the table. For those we built The Memory Palace. It is not a memory trainer: you do not memorise anything with it. It is your own 3D palace for your own memories: your photos, recordings and stories each get a room you can walk through. Private by default; you invite family and friends when you choose. The free memory palace generator is a separate tool for the classic technique. The app is made by a small team in Leuven. Have a look at the app.

Sources

• Cicero, De oratore II, 351-354 (the story of Simonides), Latin text at The Latin Library: thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/oratore2.shtml
• Rhetorica ad Herennium III, 16-20 (memory, places, every fifth place marked, images for things and for words), passages in Latin and English, University of Texas at Austin: laits.utexas.edu/memoria/Ad_Herennium_Passages.html
• Quintilian, Institutio oratoria XI, 2, Latin text at The Latin Library: thelatinlibrary.com/quintilian/quintilian.institutio11.shtml
• Roediger and Karpicke, Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention, Psychological Science 17 (2006): profiles.wustl.edu/en/publications/test-enhanced-learning-taking-memory-tests-improves-long-term-ret