Never read a speech to your audience. Never read a speech. NEVER READ A SPEECH!
I say that all the time to my clients. Every presentation coach says this. Why?
Because 99.99999% of the world reads a speech in such a way that their voice becomes flat, monotone, lifeless and boring. The audience falls instantly to sleep.
However, there is a way to read a speech effectively, even though the method is rarely used. Ronald Reagan was a practitioner of this art form. (I’m not talking about when he or others use a TelePrompTer)
Here is the process. You reformat your speech on your page so that there is only one phrase per line (not a whole sentence, just one phrase). The phrase must be short enough that it fits on one line and does not have to continue onto the next line.
Next, you put a space between each line of text. Now comes the reading part, and this is the hard part. You must silently look down at your paper and read a line, then look up and give someone in your audience direct eye contact. Then and only then do you verbalize the line. You must say it in a conversational way, full of inflection. It doesn’t have to be memorized, because it is very short and you just read it a second ago. If you change a word here or there, it shouldn’t matter. The key is to say it so that you sound like you are just talking to one person in an informal way.
The next part is tricky for most people. You must pause, silently, while you glance back down at your notes to read the next line. Your audience will appreciate the pause; it gives them a chance to catch up and digest what you are saying. Your pauses will make you seem much more confident and relaxed.
The problem for most speakers is that it feels awkward and weird to pause while they are reading the next line. So what do they do? They figure, “I’ll kill two birds with one stone and read and talk at the same time.” The puts us back to the beginning: sounding flat, boring and monotone.
The key is to remember never to read when you are talking and to never talk when you are reading. If you can master the concept of doing one thing at a time, you can read a speech effectively to any audience.
