To Script or Not to Script - That is the Question

So you’re sitting in the audience and a speaker approaches the podium. Rather than looking directly at the crowd, making eye contact with the audience and establishing a connection, the speaker looks down at their screen and without ever looking up, starts reciting their talk. If their gaze changes, it is only to look at the projected slide and direct a laser pointer to some bullet point or piece of data. The audience becomes incidental - a receptacle for the words the speaker is reading from some form of script.?

In contrast, consider a second speaker who approaches the same podium, looks out into the audience, smiles, their eyes brighten with enthusiasm and they start communicating directly to the attendees. You may feel that the speaker is communicating directly with you as your attention is now focused on what they are saying - not what they are reading.

Of course these scenarios are extreme and meant only as an illustration. In the first case, a speaker, feeling insecure and afraid of stumbling through their presentation, has written down some kind of script covering what they want to say. Perhaps they are using the Presenter’s Notes feature in PowerPoint and have broken up their script into chunks based on which slide they are projecting. But audiences know immediately when speakers are reading from a prepared script. The words may be fine. But the delivery cannot feel genuinely ‘of the moment’. It is exceedingly difficult to establish a connection between speaker and audience when reading a script. In contrast, in the second scenario, the speaker exudes confidence in their mastery of the topic and proceeds to communicate their story.?

Thus the question - should a talk - scientific or otherwise ever be scripted??

My advice is usually a bit more nuanced than the two scenarios above would suggest. There can be considerable value in preparing a script of a talk. For one thing, the act of writing down thoughts helps to consolidate them in your memory. That can be particularly useful for preventing stumbles when you are struggling to recall what you want to say. Specific words, writtten down, come easier to mind as you are speaking. So my advice, especially for novices or those preparing a talk on an unfamiliar topic is to go ahead and write a script. Ideally, the script could be in the form of notes rather than full text narrative. Properly prepared notes will contain just the information you need to recall the things you want to say and the trajectory of the narrative. But my accompanying piece of advice is if you prepare a script,?don’t use it when you deliver your talk.?That way, you will benefit from having written down what you want to say and can focus on telling your story directly to the audience.

As always, feel free to reach out to me here or at my Wordpress site (Stuartaberger.com) if you would like help preparing an upcoming talk. And please repost, like or comment to spread the word. I’m particularly open to suggestions for future topics.