memory tricks?

welcome aboard, i have to write some 20 pages of meaningful text by tomorrow. tricks? remember certain words from those lines- one word per each line that will make a somewhat sensible sentence in itself when you put them together - you can then use them as a shortcut. that's how i deal when cornered - due to my laziness and tendency towards procrastination i get myself there often enough...

yikes, good luck COTL {I can't figure out how to abbreviate your name, 'child' doesn't seem right, though it is descriptive....}

Read it out loud while pacing. Memorize 2 lines at a time and proceed by attaching the last line to the next one, in effect memorizing each line twice.

Then go over the whole and make sure you have all the lines in the right order.

Works for me!

Hi Child. When I was in college I used this technique.

http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/norhyme.html

You'll be surprised at how well this works.

I'm with Craven. This is Shakespeare we're talking about, right? find the rythm of the iambic pentameter and just do it. Repeat, repeat, repeat...

how did it go, c-light?

Record it on a continuous loop and play it during every waking moment. It works for parrots, it works for humans.

It's better for me to attempt the whole thing, rather than line by line.

I see it's already tomorrow. How'd it go?

Friends, Romanians, Cuddlymen, lend me your beers.
I come to marry Caesar, not to braise him.
The weevils that men do live after them,
The good is softly turned with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar.
The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was a missus.
If it were so, it was agree fistful and agree fistful hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leaves of Brutus and the rest,
For Brutus is an homo rabble man, so are they all, all homo rabble men,
Come I to speak in Caesar's few nurls....

Haven't had to do this in a while, but I used to act, so it's something I used to deal with all the time.

First -- the most important thing (and it's hard to emphasize this enough) is to understand every single thing you're saying, and understand why you are saying it the way you are -- that is, what is the rhetoric designed to accomplish. (Since it's Julius Caesar, I think rhetoric is the right word; ghastly sledgehammer of a play.)

Second -- since it's Shakespeare, do your scansion. Copy the passage and mark the stressed syllables of all the feet; note especially where the pentameter is broken: triplets and trochees (emphasis on the first syllable of the foot rather than the second) mean something.

Third -- memorize it.

The third step is glib, I know, but everybody does this differently. The most effective technique I was ever lucky enough to do was learning lines the way they still do it in Greece (and elsewhere, I'm sure): learn it on your feet with a prompter. When you're stuck, they feed you the next few words. Work it through with some action to link the words to physicality so that they become part of an action instead of just speechifying. The benefit of this is most obvious when you're actually preparing to perform something, but it helps for raw memorization, as well. The stress of "I have to remember this" gets subsumed by the activity of creating and re-creating the business.

But since that was seldom an option for me, I most frequently wrote the passage out as I said it aloud over and over again. It's not the greatest technique for acting, as it tends to mechanize memorization, but I usually found that after I'd carefully handwritten a passage six or eight times, it was 90% memorized.

Don't forget, though, that muttering it to yourself is not the same as delivering it to a group of people. When you think you've got it memorized, corner somebody and deliver it with full voice, looking right at them, to make sure you've really got it down. If you get all the way through without fouling it up, invite them to ask you questions about it. If you can't answer the questions, you still don't know it well enough. It doesn't have to -- indeed it shouldn't -- come out exactly the same every time, but you should know what you're saying as you say it. (At least, you don't know it well enough to get on stage and perform it; for some academic speechifying requirement it should be fine.)

So it boils down to: know what you're saying; know the rhythm of the language; commit it to memory; and tell it to people. Writing is not speaking, and speaking is not talking, if you follow my drift.

Ah, oops. This already happened. Ne'mind.

Dog: this was a great piece of writing.

I used to work in front of a mirror as well. I don't know why but seeing myself say the lines brought them home to me sooner.

Damn. I just read your post again. Excellent!! A+++
Child of the light ought to print in out and pass it out in class.

:wink: :wink:

I made a 92, so considering the situation......It's a glorious 92 indeed!

That was the exact passage I had to memorize.....well not exact.

Equus so funny loved that.

'twould have been very cruel of chile'o'lite had read that before going up...

(thanks, joe nation -- but keep in mind that that is all that remains of a five-year undergraduate education...)

You only took five years?? Wow. I started in 1965, and I'm still going to classes.

who said anything about going to classes?