How to read a script

TJ’s Insights

May 20, 2005

New Books, TJ Walker’s “Media Training A-Z”
http://www.mediatrainingworldwide.com/mediatrainingaz.html
“Presentation Training A-Z” http://www.mediatrainingworldwide.com/presentaz.html

Contract and Shorten

Sooner or later, if you are a busy executive, someone will thrust a script in your face and ask you to read it. It may be audio for a teleseminar, a webcast, an audio book intro, or a radio or TV Public Service Announcement.

Here are several tips to help you make the best of a hurried situation.

1. Convert (quickly in your own mind) everything into contractions. Say “I’ll” instead of “I will,” say “don’t” instead of “do not.” Chances are your script was written by someone who isn’t a professional script writer. That means it was written for the eye and not the ear. If you don’t use contractions, you will sound stuffy, pompous, and non-conversational.

2. Break your written sentences into smaller sentences. If you see a comma, turn it into a full-fledged period. Reuse your subject and then start the sentence over again picking up from the second half. If you try to read a long sentence, you will run out of air. Thus, your energy will deflate and you’ll sound awful.

3. If you make a mistake while you are recording the script, don’t just re-do it from the exact word where you made the mistake. Instead, go back to the beginning of the paragraph, or at least to the last point where you had a nice pause in sound. Otherwise, you will make it difficult for your good takes to be edited together.

4. Most important, if you aren’t recording “Live,” keep re-doing the script until you are happy. A flat, boring, or monotone public service announcement or corporate training video can haunt you for years.

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Author of Media Training A-Z
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TJ Walker
Media Training Worldwide
212-764-4955

Media Training Worldwide provides more media and presentation training workshops and seminars (54 separate courses) than any other company in the world. Media Training Worldwide also publishes more than 100 presentation training books, DVDs, CDs, and other information products and is the largest presentation/media training publisher in the world. For a product catalog or more information on training services call 800-755-7220 or visit http://mediatrainingworldwide.com/mediatrainingcatalogapril2004.pdf.

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