The rehearsal almost nobody does

Most people prepare for a presentation by reading it over. Eyes on the page, lips not moving, nodding along. Then they stand up and find out they’ve never actually said any of it out loud.

We film people for a living, and we see this a lot. Someone who knows their subject completely gets three sentences in and hears their own voice going strange. Nothing’s gone wrong. They just skipped a step.

Here’s how it actually works. Two steps, and almost everyone stops after the first one.

Step one: read it until you’re happy with it

Read the whole thing out loud. Not in your head. Out loud, at the speed you’d really talk, start to finish.

It’ll be uncomfortable the first time, and that’s the point. In your head you read faster than you’ll ever speak, and you smooth over everything that’s wrong. Out loud, you run out of breath in the middle of your best sentence. You hear the clause that makes you land on the wrong word. You find the bit that made sense when you wrote it and means nothing when you say it.

Fix those on the page, then go again. After a few times through, you stop tripping. You’re not performing yet, you’re just getting familiar, and familiar is what lets you stop thinking about the words.

Most people never get this far. They read it twice in their head and call it prepared.

Step two: now perform it

This is the one that changes the result, and it only works once the words are familiar.

Go again, but don’t read it. Say it. Change the wording if a better one turns up. Slow down on the part you care about. Let a sentence go where it wants to go. If you know the material, your version on the day is nearly always better than the one you wrote at a desk.

That’s a different job from reading, and it’s a higher one. It’s also what’s usually going on when someone looks natural up there. They’re not reciting. They know it well enough to play with it.

We do exactly this on shoots. Let someone read it until they’re comfortable, then ask them to perform it, and follow them instead of making them follow the script. That’s the take we keep.

Where a prompter fits

Most people think a prompter is for filming. It’s just as useful at your desk, three days before, when nobody’s watching.

Put the script in one and let it move at talking pace. You won’t skim, you won’t drift off, and you won’t stop to rewrite a sentence for ten minutes. You have to keep going, which is what happens in a room.

What you don’t want is to end up chasing the text instead of talking. We built our own prompter, Miracue, to follow your voice: if you pause it waits, and if you go back over a line it stays with you. That’s what makes step two possible. You can improvise and still have the words there when you want them.

Time it, honestly

While you’re reading out loud, time it. Not the version in your head. The real one, with the pauses in.

People usually run long. If you’ve got fifteen minutes and your script is eighteen, that’s not something you can speed up through. Take something out now, on paper, calmly, instead of in the room at minute fourteen.

Make the page easy to speak from

Whatever you’re reading from shouldn’t look like a document.

Short lines. One thought per line. A blank line where you want a pause. Bigger text than feels sensible. Bold on the two or three words you can’t afford to fumble.

Because the second you look up at people, you lose your spot. Hunting for it again is usually what makes someone sound robotic, not the reading.

Know your first thirty seconds and your last line

The open, so you start clean instead of apologising your way in. The close, so you land it instead of trailing off into “so, yeah, that’s it”.

The middle can be looser than you’d think once you know the shape of it.

And if you’re giving the kind of talk where you’re expected to have every word by heart, we wrote about that separately, including why most talks aren’t that kind.

So

Read it out loud until it’s familiar. Then stop reading and perform it, in your own words, at your own pace. Time it honestly, lay the page out for speaking, and know your open and your close.

It doesn’t take long, and it’s the difference between someone reciting at a room and someone talking to it.

Miracue is ours and it’s free if you want it for the rehearsal. It runs in your browser and there’s no account to make.