TJ Walker advises speakers not to read speeches because reading flattens voice, kills eye contact, and loses audience attention. He allows limited exceptions (e.g., heads of state or high-scrutiny settings where exact wording matters) and recommends working from a single-sheet outline with sentence fragments and a conversational delivery; experienced readers (e.g., Dan Rather) may make reading work.
Chapters
Tip of the Never read a speech. I mean it. Seriously. Don't try to read a speech with few exceptions, and I'll go into those exceptions in a moment, but let me list all the reasons you should never read a speech. People do it because they think, oh, this way I won't leave anything out. I won't make a mistake. Guess what? You've already made a huge mistake. If you've decided to read speech. The second you read a speech, your voice basically goes completely flat. It becomes monotone, becomes way too consistent. You have completely destroyed your eye contact with the audience. Ask yourself this. Think of the last time you were at a conference, a convention, a workshop, and someone read a speech to you. Did you like it? Chances are no. Chances are you saw this as an opportunity to pull out your cell phone, check your email, or check sports scores or stock price. So if you know already that you hate it when other people do it, why would you want to do it yourself? Yeah, yeah. But teacher, I didn't have time to prepare and I didn't know it all, so I had to read it. No, you don't. There are only a couple of occasions when I think it's appropriate to read. If you are a president of a country, a prime minister, if everything you're saying is being presented to the United Nations General assembly and being translated into 150 languages, if you are a finance minister and in charge of your own currency, sure, then you can read a speech because every single word is going to be analyzed, sliced, diced, looked at, criticized, scrutinized. And you could cause wars. You could cause major trade wars. You could cause all sorts of problems if you got one word wrong. So there are times when you need to read a speech because the stakes are so high and the level of scrutiny is so great. But for most of us, most of the time, even if you are a CEO of a huge publicly traded company, the problem is not that people are dissecting every single word we say in a speech or presentation. The biggest problem we have is nobody remembers anything we said two minutes after we finished. So you've got to focus on the far greater problem. The biggest problem most speakers have is just getting people to pay attention and remember the key points so they act on it. That is why I do not recommend reading a speech now. There's nothing wrong with having notes if you limit it to a single sheet and you use sentence fragments. That way you're not tempted to have your head down and staring at notes. So you can certainly say there are exceptions. I've seen Dan Rather, the former CBS News anchor, read a speech to a public relations convention, and you know what? He did a pretty good job. Well, guess what? Dan Rather has experience reading scripts and text for hours and hours a day for 60 years. So if you have that kind of experience, by all means do it. But for most people, including myself, we just don't have enough experience reading scripts and making it sound natural, lively, interesting. So don't try. Instead, work from an outline, keep it to a single sheet and have a conversation. Don't worry about getting it word for word, right. Worry about the idea and making it interesting and engaging, and you'll be much better off than anyone who reads a speech.
