"Knowing your text allows you to move away from it, to improvise and react to unexpected situations without losing the thread of your story" - Johnathan Renoux
Whether you are a magician, a speaker, an actor, or anything else, at some point you will always have to learn a text. Some people seem to find this easier than others, yet, everyone is capable of learning a long text, you just need to know how to go about it. In this article, we will detail a step-by-step method and share tips for easily learning your text.
Step 1: Understand the text
First and foremost, and before any memorization effort, understand that it is much harder to learn something by heart that you don't understand than something that makes sense to you. Thus, if you want to give yourself every chance to easily learn your text, an important step is understanding it. Take the time to read it at least once completely, at your leisure, and in peace, to fully immerse yourself in it.
Look up words you don't understand, clarify grey areas, in short, make your text as clear as possible for learning. This simple act of trying to understand the text will begin to feed your brain with information that will then be much easier to retain. By doing this comprehension work, you can also annotate this first version of the text by looking for certain other points:
✅ Analyze the meaning of the sentences: what exactly is the text about? What is the main message it conveys? Who is the author, and under what conditions was it written? For what purpose (is it a speech, a play, a poem...).
✅ Identify key ideas: don't hesitate to highlight or annotate your text to identify the essential points.
✅ Identify the structure: does the text have its own logic? Perhaps it's a logic in its chronology of events, in its argument, in its form, etc. Identifying a possible structure (there isn't always one) can greatly help to memorize the text later, because you will make it "logical".
Tip: you can rewrite the text in your own words to ensure you have fully understood its content.
Step 2: Active Reading
That's it, the text holds no more secrets for you? It's time to start learning it properly. If at the very beginning you had no idea of the content of the text to learn, you should now, with the preparatory work from step 1, already have the main ideas of the text and its general theme in mind.
The idea now will be to read the text, but not just reading it silently in your head, you must experience the text, immerse yourself in it deeply. To do this, read the text aloud and adopt the tone you will use when you recite the text. If it's a speech, take on a solemn air; for a comedic play, be cheerful; for a story, adopt a mysterious air... Each different situation will make you work on the intonation of the text, which will make it all the more vibrant and easier to memorize.
You can also act out the text with gestures: while reciting it aloud, don't hesitate to move, to make gestures, to walk, especially if it's a play! Movements will help the brain to memorize.
Finally, for rather neutral things to learn, like a list of key points or that kind of thing, a frequently used trick is to recite the words that make up the list in the form of a song. Try it: recite the alphabet, right now. Chances are you recited it with the little tune in the background that we all learned the letters to at school. The association of music and learning is very strong. Also, nothing prevents you from creating your own song for other words, a song that will then come naturally when you need to recite your text.
Step 3: The first letter method
You have already reread a text that you now understand perfectly several times. Perhaps you have already learned a list of words with a song, but that is not enough to learn an entire text by heart. Here we will give you a powerful method to finally achieve this. But know that you have already done the bulk of the work with this preparation part.
In his book Spectacle en couleurs, Jonathan Renoux provides several concrete methods for designing a real close-up show, including how to learn your text. We could call this technique "the first letter method" and we will detail it for you here!
To illustrate this method, here is an excerpt from a poem by Jean Cocteau that we invite you to try and learn:
Step 1: Read the text
To learn a text, you first need to know what it's about! So, to begin, read the text 4 or 5 times, aloud.
Step 2: The first words
Second step, take out a piece of paper, and copy the first letter of each word of the text (respect lowercase, uppercase, and punctuation). For our example, this will give something like this:
Where the brain is incredible is that we manage to recognize many words, even though most of the letters are already erased! You are not far from knowing the text!
Step 3: Read this new text
The last step is to read the fill-in-the-blanks text you just wrote several times, aloud, and therefore only using the first letters of each word. If in doubt, you can, of course, refer to the original text.
Finally, recite the text again, but this time without the help of the first letters. Do it several times.
By following these steps, you can now easily and quickly learn any text! This can be useful for learning the text of your act, but also for a poem, or any speech!
And to discover even more concrete tips like this one on staging and creating a magic show, dive into Jonathan Renoux's Spectacle en couleurs!
