Booher BanterBusiness Communication Consultant

After a day with a client, coaching executives on using the teleprompter, I came home on Monday evening to discover our top executive had his own prompter problems. When President Obama lost his place while reading from the prompter, came to a dead stop in his speech, and had to tell the operator to move up the script, his recovery wasn’t nearly on par with Bill Clinton’s ad lib during the 1994 state-of-the-union speech when he had prompter problems. 

Glancing at the prompters as he began, Clinton shook his head, grinned, and turned back to the crowd: “I don’t know what speech they’ve loaded into the prompter, but I came to tell you about the state of the union…” And he did just that. He had rehearsed his speech enough to internalize what he intended to say, and he launched in, unfazed for 20 minutes without the prompters.

If you have similar tech glitches when your big day comes (or if an audience member faints—as happened in President Obama’s audience on Tuesday) the crowd often remembers your recovery more than your relapse. For those cases, you need specific techniques.  Keep the following tips in mind to tackle your prompter problems.

• Have a back-up plan. Either know your material well enough that you could deliver the essence of it without a script. Or, have a written script, talking points, or notes for reference in case there’s a problem with the technology.
• Use the technology features to their fullest: Formatting text in colors, bold, or italics aids in reading. For example, you might add names in blue or key statistics in green. Directions such as “pause” should always be in italics. Use bullets to set off items in a series—even a short list of phrases in sentences.
• Pay attention to the punctuation. When speakers cannot see a complete sentence, punctuation tells them how to inflect their voice—even when they don’t know what’s ahead. Some people are careless when entering changes into the prompter, for example, and use a hyphen and a dash interchangeably. The two marks have totally different meanings and cause a reader to inflect the voice in opposite ways. Another problem: Dashes and parentheses call for different inflection. A speaker raises the voice on the words between dashes. A speaker lowers the voice on words inside parentheses. If you’re stumbling over a script on the teleprompter, check the punctuation. That’s often the problem.
• Turn from one teleprompter to the other (side to side) at the end of a sentence and where you see a blank space on the screen—not in mid-sentence. Otherwise, it’s far too easy to lose your place in the script.
• Remember that you set the speaking rate.  It’s the operator’s job to stay with you—not the other way around. When you speed up, the teleprompter rolls faster. When you slow down, the teleprompter slows down. Your call.

Finally, connect brain to words coming out of mouth—just in case the teleprompter falls asleep!

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