94
11.1 Never Learn Your Text by Heart
Delivering a good presentation, especially a short one with a tight and enforced time
limit, requires a lot of practice. Practicing a lot does not mean learning your text by
heart. This is actually a very bad thing to do. Delivering verbatim a speech learned
by heart always sounds highly non-natural. Plus, if you forget a word or a sentence,
you will lose balance and control, and might never get back on track.
However, with a relatively short talk (less than 15 minutes), you may write down
the text of your speech, just to clearly determine what you intend to talk about – that
helps gauging the time required to deliver the information:
• Print your presentation slides, 6 slides per page. Use this to hand-write your text
(very limited space, that’s OK)
• As you read and time yourself, you can cut/add material and cleanup sentences,
until you can meet the tight timeline
• Writing down and improving the text minimizes chances of dwelling over any
particular subject, getting caught in your words
• But never read your text during your talk!
11 Practice
11.1 Never Learn Your Text by Heart
Delivering a good presentation, especially a short one with a tight and enforced time
limit, requires a lot of practice. Practicing a lot does not mean learning your text by
heart. This is actually a very bad thing to do. Delivering verbatim a speech learned
by heart always sounds highly non-natural. Plus, if you forget a word or a sentence,
you will lose balance and control, and might never get back on track.
However, with a relatively short talk (less than 15 minutes), you may write down
the text of your speech, just to clearly determine what you intend to talk about – that
helps gauging the time required to deliver the information:
• Print your presentation slides, 6 slides per page. Use this to hand-write your text
(very limited space, that’s OK)
• As you read and time yourself, you can cut/add material and cleanup sentences,
until you can meet the tight timeline
• Writing down and improving the text minimizes chances of dwelling over any
particular subject, getting caught in your words
• But never read your text during your talk!
11 Practice