EP58: Speaker Tip Spotlight: Three Teleprompter Tips That Make You Sound Natural on Camera
episode
Speaker Dynamics | Leadership, Communication & Public Speaking
11 min
1 speaker
1 chapter
transcribed 1 month ago
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When I do on camera training, often I am working with people on their teleprompter skills, which is if you're not familiar with it, when you're talking to a camera and you have your words that you're supposed to be saying in front of the camera so that it looks like you are just looking directly into the camera, but you see the actual script that is scrolling in front of you. And this is a skill that most Most of us do not innately have. And it becomes readily apparent when I do the first exercise I do with them. for that teleprompter training I have them first do A version of a story that they're telling just off the top of their head, speaking spontaneously. And typically that goes pretty well. It's a story that they, you know, know well.
They don't have to come up with a scripting for it per se. And then the second half of that is they have to deliver part of a presentation that is fully scripted. and appears on the teleprompter and they have to read it word for word. That typically does not go very well. And the participants in this training always say, oh my gosh, that is so much more difficult to do. Why is that? Well, that's one of the things that we talk about in this teleprompter training. And I want to share with you how you can make it easier if you're encountering that situation so that you appear as authentic and natural when you're speaking to a teleprompted script versus one that is just coming off the top of your head. That's in today's speaker tip spotlight.
Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Karen Reed. I'm a four-time author, Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, and communication expert on helping people to own the room, whether it be a physical one or a virtual one. Welcome to Speaker Dynamics.
How to use a teleprompter. Probably not a course that was on your list in business school or really in any other sort of profession that you're preparing for, aside from maybe news anchor or on-camera spokesperson. But now, because we are using video in so many different ways, uh, teleprompter skills are becoming more and more important. But Most of us don't know how to do that well. So today I want to give you my top three tips on how to navigate the teleprompter. I'm going to call it tackling the teleprompter. So the first tip is that you want to write the way you speak. So a lot of times what I'll see people try to do is they'll take something that was intended just to be read silently. You know, think about like a press release or even some verbiage that you have on a Word doc or that you've put on your website and they stick it into a teleprompter script and expect to be able to perform it well.
That often did not does not go well because whenever you are speaking something that is intended to be read silently. It presents all sorts of challenges for you to actually wrap your mouth around the words. Uh, you know, we don't use proper rules of grammar when we are speaking. You know, typically we're, you know, cutting off sentences. Sometimes they're not full sentences. Maybe we we end a sentence in a preposition. Oh no. And that is something that we usually don't do if we're just writing it uh to to uh be used as something that you just read silently. And if you try to translate that into what you're trying to give voice to it can really be challenging. So In order to kind of break the rules of grammar, you almost have to
you know, write it out loud. So for example, what you would see if you walk into a newsroom, oftentimes you see people who are seemingly talking to themselves. They're they're talking to themselves and they're typing at the same time. And the reason why they're doing that is because they want to make sure that the words that come out of their mouth when they ultimately perform it are easy to say. And there's no Yeah. Except to actually give it voice as you're composing it. Uh so what I would recommend to you is make sure that you write the way you speak. So rather than perhaps sitting down and silently typing out your script, maybe you want to dictate it. And that way you actually are using uh the words in such a way as you would if you were just, you know, speaking to it spontaneously.
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