How to practice a speech or presentation: a 5-run plan

Practising a speech well is less about how many times you run it and more about what each run is for. A run in your head checks nothing. A run aloud checks the words. A timed run checks the length. A recorded run shows you what an audience will see. Treat those as separate jobs and five runs will get you further than twenty that are all the same.

This is the schedule we would give anyone with a talk, a pitch or a recorded presentation in the next few days. It works for a wedding toast, a quarterly update, a conference slot or a one-minute video for LinkedIn — scale the number of words, not the method.

The five-run rehearsal schedule

Spread the runs across at least two days if you can. A night between run 2 and run 3 does something no amount of same-day repetition does: you come back and hear the sentence that was always going to be a problem.

Run 1: the read-through

Read it out loud, once, without performing. You are listening for three things: sentences too long to say in one breath, word pairs that collide (“specific statistics”), and anything you only wrote because it looked good on the page. Mark them and fix them before the next run. Writing for the ear is different from writing for the eye, and how to write a script meant to be read aloud goes into the specific changes — shorter sentences, one idea per line, numbers written the way you say them.

Run 2: the timed run

Now run it at the pace you would actually use, with a stopwatch, and do not stop for mistakes. Most people find they are long. That is normal, and it is much cheaper to find out now than on stage. Note the time for each section, not just the total, so you know where to cut.

Run 3: the recorded run

Prop your phone at eye level and record a full run. This is the run that changes the most, because it is the only one that shows you what other people will see. What to look for is in its own section below.

Run 4: the prompter pass

Put the script on a teleprompter and run it at a fixed speed. A prompter is unforgiving in a useful way: it keeps moving, so it trains you to recover from a fluffed line and carry on rather than stopping to restart — which is the habit that matters most on the day. If you will deliver the speech from a prompter, this is a dress rehearsal. If you will not, it still tells you whether you know the shape of the talk well enough to keep up with it.

Run 5: the final run

One full run, standing, ideally in the room or the spot where you will record. Do not change the script after this run. Last-minute edits are where the lines you then forget come from.

How long should your speech be? Timing by word count

If you have a time slot, work backwards to a word count before you rehearse anything. At a comfortable speaking pace:

These are the default rates our app uses per writing system, and they are starting points, not measurements of you. Your timed run is the real number. Two things push it long: pauses, which you will make on the day whether or not you rehearsed them, and numbers, which take far longer to say than to write. Budget around 10% under the slot. There is a full table for every common length in how many words is a 1, 2, 3 or 5 minute speech, and the reason the languages differ is in teleprompter speed by language.

Recording yourself: what to watch for

Watching yourself is uncomfortable for everyone, which is exactly why most people skip it. Make it bearable by watching with a checklist rather than with your feelings. Watch it twice.

First pass, sound off

• Eyes. Where are they? Darting to notes, drifting to the ceiling at the start of each thought, or reading across a screen all read as uncertainty. If you are on camera, the lens is your audience.
• Hands. Hands that move with a point are fine. Hands that fidget, clasp or keep touching your face are what you are looking for.
• Openings and endings. Look at the first five seconds and the last five. Nervous people start talking before they have settled and leave before they have finished.

Second pass, sound on

• Pace. Does it speed up when you are unsure? Most people rush the parts they know least well.
• Fillers. Count the “um”, “so” and “basically”. Do not try to eliminate them all; aim to replace the ones at the start of sentences with a pause.
• The sentence you dread. There is always one. If you stumble on it in the recording, rewrite it rather than drilling it.

If the talk itself will be recorded rather than delivered live, the recorded run is also your test of the setup — light, sound and framing. The phone-specific version of that is in how to set up a talking-head video with just a phone.

Should you memorise it, read it, or use a prompter?

It depends on the setting, and getting this decision right early changes how you rehearse. If you do decide to learn it, how to memorise a script fast has the methods that hold up under nerves.

Word-for-word memorisation is the riskiest of the lot for most people, because it fails all at once: lose one line and the chain breaks. If you want to commit something to memory anyway, the techniques that work are in the memorising guide linked above. If you are reading on camera, the hard part is not knowing the words but not looking like you are reading them, which is covered in how to read a script while looking at the camera.

Practising with nerves, not around them

Nerves are not a sign the rehearsal failed. They arrive anyway, so the rehearsal should include them rather than pretend they will not come.

• Over-rehearse the first 30 seconds. Nerves peak at the start and fall once you are moving. An opening you could say half asleep carries you through the worst of it.
• Practise recovering, not just succeeding. In one run, deliberately lose your place and find it again. That is a skill, and it is the one you will need.
• Rehearse standing up. Your breathing is different sitting down, and you will run short of breath in places you never noticed.
• Stop rehearsing an hour before. A last-minute run mostly rehearses anxiety. Read the first line once and leave it.

If the camera is what makes you nervous rather than the audience, that is a separate and very fixable problem; how to be confident on camera is about exactly that.

Practising a speech in Orate

Orate is a phone teleprompter, and two parts of it are built for the schedule above. Paste the script in, or import it from a .txt file, and the app shows the read time worked out from the script’s writing system — that is your run 2 estimate before you have said a word.

1. Prompter-only mode for run 4. It scrolls the script with no camera running, so you can rehearse delivery as often as you like without filling your phone with takes you will delete.
2. Video mode for runs 3 and 5. The script scrolls in a band directly under the front camera, so the recording shows how you will look reading it. Recording starts after the countdown (three seconds by default).
3. Pace as you go. The pace slider sits on the recorder and runs from 0.4× to 2× of your script’s own rate. Drag it mid-run and the script keeps its place, so a rehearsal that turns out too fast or too slow does not have to be restarted.
4. Audio-only mode records sound alone, if what you are rehearsing is a talk or a voiceover where the recording of your voice is all you need.

It is free, needs no account and works offline, so it also works in the green room. If you are new to prompters generally, start with how to use a teleprompter on your phone.

A one-page checklist

1. Work out the word count for your slot, and cut to about 10% under it.
2. Read it aloud once with a pen; fix every sentence you could not say in one breath.
3. Time a full run at performance pace; cut the fattest section.
4. Record a run; watch it once silent and once with sound.
5. Fix what the recording showed, then do a prompter pass at a fixed pace.
6. Over-rehearse the first 30 seconds and the last line.
7. One final run standing, in the real space; then stop changing the script.

Questions people ask

What is the best way to practice a speech?

Run it aloud, not in your head, and give each run a different job: one to check the words, one to time it, one recorded so you can watch yourself, one to rehearse delivery, and a final full run. Five deliberate runs do more than many identical ones.

How many times should I rehearse a presentation?

For most talks of five to ten minutes, five full runs spread over at least two days is enough to be fluent without sounding memorised. Rehearse the opening and the closing more often than the middle, because those are where nerves land.

Should I record myself practising a speech?

Yes, at least once. A recording shows the habits you cannot feel while speaking: pace, filler words, where your eyes go and what your hands do. Watch it once with the sound off and once with it on.

How long does it take to say a speech of a given length?

At a comfortable 150 words a minute in English, 300 words is about two minutes and 750 words about five. At Orate's default rates, a starting point rather than a measurement, Hindi and other Devanagari scripts are paced at 130 words a minute and Tamil and Telugu at 115, so the same word count takes longer.

Should I memorize my speech word for word?

Usually not. Memorise the opening line, the closing line and the order of your points, and speak the rest from that structure or from a prompter. Word-for-word memory tends to collapse completely when one line goes missing.