Write Out and Memorize Your Speech?

Nearly all speech trainers from Dale Carnegie on to this day will tell you not to write out and memorize your speech. They encourage you to  make an outline of  ideas and speak from that as it will free you from being tied to your  written notes which will help you to deliver a much more lively and interesting speech.  And this is true.

But I would not go so far as to say not to write out your speech as you are organizing all of your material.  It will help you to become more familiar with it. Particularly -- if you write it out by hand; this will help to burn it into your mind. Recent studies have shown that we remember things much more vividly when we write them out -- by hand.

 But then put it aside and reduce your speech to some sort of speaking outline, making it as graphic as possible. Reduce it to ideas, with as many illustrations, anecdotes and other supporting material as you can

Use your written copy of the speech, which should be choc full of information and details just only to refresh your memory on certain point as you practice mentally and orally with your outline.

Don't memorize anything. From this point on just review your outline and mentally and orally practice what you want to say and how you can say it in as many different ways as possible. Don't try to say it the same way each time. Just make sure that you know all of the main ideas and supporting information.

This is where reducing or organizing your speech to a Mind Map is especially helpful. Each main idea branches off from the nucleus of the map with supporting information branching off this main arm -- like the branches of a tree.

So yes, write out your speech (by hand) following that original Mind map outline you made to organize your material, but then put the written copy aside and practice and deliver your presentation using  that (Mind Map) outline or another outline.