Say this sentence out loud: “I never said he stole the money.”
Now say it again, but put the emphasis on “I.” Really lean into it. “I never said he stole the money.”
What does that mean? It means someone else said it. Maybe they said it. Maybe she said it. But I didn’t say it. The emphasis on “I” shifts the meaning to a question of who made the accusation.
Now shift the emphasis to “never.” “I never said he stole the money.” Now you’re denying the claim emphatically. Nobody is debating who said it. The debate is about whether it was said at all, and you’re insisting it wasn’t.
Move the emphasis to “said.” “I never said he stole the money.” This implies that maybe you didn’t say it, but you implied it. Or wrote it. Or hinted at it. The accusation happened, but not through direct speech.
“He.” “I never said he stole the money.” Someone stole the money, certainly. You just didn’t say it was him. It could have been anyone.
“Stole.” “I never said he stole the money.” He has the money, sure, but maybe he borrowed it. Found it. Was given it. The issue isn’t that he has it. The issue is how he obtained it.
“The.” “I never said he stole the money.” He stole money, yes. Just not that specific money. Not the money everyone is worried about.
“Money.” “I never said he stole the money.” He stole something, but it wasn’t money. Maybe documents. Maybe time. Maybe an idea.
Seven words. Seven completely different meanings. Same sentence every time.
I first encountered this exercise in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, and it stopped me cold. Not because I didn’t know that emphasis changes meaning — anyone who speaks a language knows that on some level. What stopped me was the implication for performance: if I’m saying the same script every night, and I’m emphasizing the same words every time, I’m only ever communicating one of many possible meanings. I’m leaving six other interpretations on the table. And worse, my delivery is becoming mechanical, because my emphasis pattern has calcified into a habit I’m no longer making conscious choices about.
The Mechanical Script Problem
This is a problem every performer faces, and it’s particularly acute for people like me who came to performance later in life and approached it systematically.
When I wrote my first script, I was meticulous about it. Every word chosen with care. Every pause considered. Every transition mapped out. And then I practiced it. Over and over, in hotel rooms across Austria and beyond, saying the same words in the same order until they were locked into muscle memory.
The locking was the point. As I wrote about in an earlier post, memorization enables spontaneity — knowing your script cold is what gives you the freedom to deviate from it, because you always have a safe house to return to. But memorization has a shadow side. When you memorize words, you also memorize the way you say them. The emphasis. The rhythm. The inflection pattern. All of it gets encoded together, as a single unit, and after enough repetitions, you can no more change the emphasis on a particular line than you can change the words themselves.
Your script becomes a recording. Not a living thing that responds to the moment, but a playback. And the audience can tell. They may not know they can tell, but their brains register the difference between someone who is choosing their words right now and someone who is reciting something they memorized last month. The reciter sounds smooth, polished, professional. The chooser sounds alive.
The difference is emphasis.
Why Emphasis Matters More Than You Think
Here’s the deeper principle behind Weber’s technique, and it’s one I had to learn the hard way.
Emphasis is how your audience knows what to pay attention to. In any sentence, the emphasized word is the one that carries the semantic weight. It’s the word the listener’s brain flags as important, the one that gets processed most deeply, the one that shapes the overall interpretation of the sentence.
When you emphasize the same word every time you say a line, you train your audience to interpret that line one way. That’s fine if it’s the right way. But over dozens of performances, you stop evaluating whether it’s the right way. You stop asking “what does this sentence need to communicate in this moment?” and start relying on the pattern you’ve already established.
And here’s the insidious part: the audience starts to feel that pattern too. Not consciously — they don’t sit there thinking “he always emphasizes the third word.” But unconsciously, their brains detect the regularity. And regularity is predictability, and predictability, as Weber would say, is poison.
When I started paying attention to my emphasis patterns, I discovered something alarming. I had a default emphasis style. Not just for specific sentences, but for all sentences. My emphasis tended to fall on the same structural positions — usually the verb or the final noun — regardless of what the sentence actually meant. It was a cadence, not a choice. A habit pattern, not a communication strategy.
The Exercise
Here’s what I started doing, and I still do this regularly whenever I’m working on a script or refreshing old material.
Take a single key sentence from your performance. Just one. The more important the better — choose a line that matters, one that does real work in your script.
Write it out. Then mark it seven times, each time with a different word emphasized. Even if the sentence has more or fewer than seven words, the principle holds: every single word in that sentence is a candidate for emphasis, and each choice creates a different meaning.
Say each version out loud. Not in your head — out loud. Feel the difference in your mouth. Hear the difference in the room. Notice which version creates the meaning you actually want to communicate. And notice how many versions create meanings you had never considered, meanings that might be more interesting or more effective than your default.
I did this exercise with a line from my mentalism routine. The line was straightforward: “You could have thought of any word in that book.” Here’s what happened when I shifted the emphasis:
“YOU could have thought of any word in that book.” — This highlights the spectator’s free will. You, specifically, had the power to choose.
“You COULD have thought of any word in that book.” — This introduces the theoretical possibility. You had the capacity. The fact that you didn’t choose differently isn’t the point.
“You could have THOUGHT of any word in that book.” — This emphasizes the mental act. Thinking. Not choosing, not picking, but the private act of thought. For a mentalism piece, this is loaded.
“You could have thought of ANY word in that book.” — This emphasizes the range of possibilities. Any word. Not just easy words, not just obvious ones. The selection space was enormous.
“You could have thought of any WORD in that book.” — Subtler. This distinguishes words from, say, images or numbers. The medium of selection.
“You could have thought of any word in THAT book.” — Now you’re directing attention to the specific book. That one. Not another one.
“You could have thought of any word in that BOOK.” — Emphasizes the source object. The physical book.
My default delivery emphasized “any.” “You could have thought of ANY word in that book.” That’s not bad. It communicates the openness of the choice. But after doing this exercise, I realized that for the specific moment in my routine where this line lands, emphasizing “thought” is far more powerful. “You could have THOUGHT of any word in that book.” Because the entire premise of the effect is about thought. About the private, invisible, seemingly unreachable act of thinking. By emphasizing “thought,” I’m reinforcing the central impossibility: how could I have accessed something that existed only in your mind?
That’s a small change. One word. But it shifted the meaning of the entire sentence in a way that better served the effect.
Keeping It Fresh
Weber’s real insight isn’t just that you should find the right emphasis for each line. It’s that you should vary which words you stress even in material you’ve said hundreds of times.
This sounds contradictory. If I just spent time finding the perfect emphasis for that mentalism line, why would I then change it?
Because perfect emphasis delivered the same way every time stops being perfect. It becomes automatic. And automatic delivery has a quality to it — a smoothness, a frictionlessness — that signals to the audience that what they’re hearing is pre-recorded. Rehearsed. Canned.
The alternative is to make emphasis a living decision. Not random — you’re not just emphasizing different words at random to keep yourself amused. But responsive. What does this particular audience, in this particular room, on this particular night, need to hear? Where should the weight of this sentence fall for these people, right now?
Sometimes the answer is the same emphasis you’ve used a hundred times. Sometimes it’s different. The point isn’t that you must change. The point is that you must choose. Every time. Actively. Consciously. Not letting muscle memory make the decision for you.
This is harder than it sounds. After fifty or a hundred performances, the grooves are deep. Your emphasis patterns are encoded in the same neural pathways as the words themselves, and overriding them requires genuine cognitive effort. But that effort is visible to the audience. Not as struggle — as aliveness. As the quality of someone who is present, making decisions in real time, responding to the moment rather than pressing play on a mental recording.
The Three-Pass Technique
Here’s the practical method I settled on for keeping emphasis fresh across performances.
Before a show, I pick three lines from the script. Just three. I don’t try to vary everything — that would be overwhelming and probably counterproductive. Three lines.
For each line, I choose a different emphasis than my default. I say them out loud a few times to feel the new pattern. I commit to trying the new emphasis during the actual performance.
During the performance, when I get to those lines, I deliver them with the altered emphasis. Sometimes it feels better than my default. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the audience response tells me something I didn’t expect.
After the performance, I evaluate. Did the new emphasis work? Did it change how the line landed? Did the audience react differently? If it was better, I keep it for a while. If it wasn’t, I go back. If it was interesting but not conclusive, I try it again next time.
Three lines per show. That’s manageable. Over ten shows, I’ve experimented with thirty different emphasis variations. Over fifty shows, I’ve explored my entire script multiple times. And the cumulative effect is that I know my material not as a fixed recording but as a flexible instrument that can be played in different ways.
The Bigger Lesson
This technique extends far beyond magic performance. Any time you say the same words repeatedly — a keynote you give at conferences, a pitch you deliver to clients, a lecture you teach semester after semester — emphasis variation is the difference between sounding like a professional and sounding like a robot.
I use this in my consulting work now too. When I’m delivering a presentation I’ve given dozens of times, I pick three key sentences and consciously shift the emphasis. It forces me to think about what I’m saying as I’m saying it, which keeps me engaged, which keeps the audience engaged. The loop feeds itself.
Seven words. Seven meanings. Same sentence.
That’s not just a linguistic curiosity. That’s the difference between a script that lives and a script that’s on life support. And the choice is made not in the writing, but in the speaking. Every single time.