Alright, so tomorrow is your big speech and you don’t feel as prepared as you would like to. Maybe you waited until the last second to do it, like I used to for my public speaking class. Maybe you’ve been studying it, but still feel like you can’t remember a lot of it. Don’t stress over it though, there are plenty of techniques I learned during public speaking for memorizing your speech easily. Are you ready to learn how to memorize a speech in one day?

The first thing you are going to do before you learn how to memorize a speech is to write it up. Make sure you spend a little bit of time on this because it will be what you are presenting, and you don’t want it to sound bad. So, do your best on this part, and try to learn a few things while writing it. That way you will have some information in the back of your head. In case you do forget some of it, you will be able to save yourself a little bit.

Once, you‘ve gotten your nice beautiful speech written out it’s time to record it using a computer. Hopefully you have some sort of microphone to use to record it. When recording it, read the entire speech and record it in one long recording. Then record the speech in one minute sections. The best way to do this is to write in semi-short paragraphs and record each paragraph so that you have a few sections.

Now that you have a couple of recordings, listen to them while doing other tasks, such as working on the PowerPoint presentation. If you don’t need to make a presentation, just do some homework while listening to them. Listen to the entire thing once, and then listen to one section. Keep doing this until you’ve memorized the first section. Now, move onto the next section, but make sure you are alternating between the entire speech and the section. This way you will keep the sections you’ve memorized fresh in your brain.

Once you think you have the entire speech memorized it’s time to deliver it. Speak to a mirror, your dog, a family member, whatever, just make sure you are actually speaking your speech. This builds onto the memorizing, while making you more confident about the delivery. Act like you are speaking to your audience right now. Use body language and all that jazz.

Before you go to sleep put the entire speech recording on repeat overnight. Some people say this helps embed things into your head, and some say it doesn’t work at all. It’s not like it will hurt you, so just try it. I used to sleep with my headphones in with my speech going, and I memorized it perfectly fine.

Set your alarm 30 minutes before you would actually get up. Use these extra minutes wisely and go over your speech a few more times. This is like a small cram session and just reinforces what you should already know. You may need more than 30 minutes depending on how long your speech is. You could also put the recordings on your mp3 player and listen to them before you perform the speech.

Now go knock your speech out of the ballpark. You’ve just learned how to memorize a speech in one day!