Write scripts for the ear, not the page

A reader can go back. A listener cannot.

That single difference is behind almost every rule below.

Someone reading a page controls the pace. They can stop halfway through a sentence, look at the start of it again, and carry on. Someone listening to you gets one pass at the words in the order you say them, at the speed you say them, with no way back. Anything that requires holding a clause open until the end is a sentence they will lose.

Good written prose exploits the reader's ability to re-read. It nests, it qualifies, it defers the verb. All of that turns into fog when it is spoken, and a teleprompter will roll it past you at a steady rate regardless. A prompter fixes where your eyes point. It cannot fix a sentence that was never going to survive being said out loud.

The test is reading it out loud, once, before anything else

Read the draft aloud at the pace you would actually use, and mark every place you stumble.

The stumble is the edit. It is not a delivery problem to be practised away. If your mouth cannot get through a phrase on the first attempt, that phrase is built wrong, and rehearsing it only teaches you to survive a bad sentence. Cut it, split it, or say it a different way, and move on.

Do this before you touch anything else. Half the problems people blame on a prompter are sentences that were never going to work aloud, and they are visible in one read-through.

One idea per sentence

Compare these.

Although the survey, which closed on Friday, had fewer responses than last year's, the results, once weighted, tell much the same story.

The survey closed on Friday. We got fewer responses than last year. Weighted, the results say much the same thing.

The first is fine on a page. Said out loud it asks the listener to hold "although" open across two nested clauses before anything resolves. By the time the main verb arrives they have dropped it.

The second is three sentences and eight words shorter. It also gives you three places to breathe, which the first does not.

Full stops are the cheapest thing in a script. Use more of them than you would in writing.

Put the subject at the front and leave it there

Written English tolerates a long run-up. Speech does not.

What the team found, after six weeks of testing three different builds, was that the crash was in the installer all along.

The team tested three builds for six weeks. The crash was in the installer.

Front-load the sentence with who did what. Detail, qualification and dates go after, in their own sentences, where the listener can attach them to something they are already holding.

Numbers, names, and anything you have to decode

Numbers are where scripts break most visibly, because you cannot ad-lib your way past a figure you cannot say.

• Round, then say the exact number only if it matters. "About one in three" beats "34.7 per cent" every time, and "one point four million" beats "1,438,206".
• Put the unit next to the number, in the order you would say it, and write it as words: "forty thousand dollars", not "$40k".
• Give one comparison rather than three figures. A listener can hold one.
• Never put two numbers in the same sentence.

Names and acronyms need the same treatment. Expand an acronym the first time and use the short form after. For a name you find hard, write the pronunciation into the script instead of the spelling. Nobody sees the script but you, so there is no reason for it to hold the correct spelling of a word you are about to mispronounce.

Then there are the words that look the same and sound different. "Read", "lead", "live", "record", "present", "wound", "close", "row". Each one forces a decision at the moment you hit it, and the prompter does not wait for you to make it. Put the disambiguating word before them rather than after: "a live broadcast" is safe, "the broadcast was live" makes you guess.

Punctuation is breathing, not grammar

In a script, a comma is a short pause, a full stop is a longer one, and a paragraph break is a beat where you can look away and come back.

That means your punctuation is allowed to disagree with a style guide. Put a comma where you would breathe even if the clause does not need one. Break a sentence in two where you want the pause, even if it leaves a fragment. A fragment is a legitimate spoken sentence and always has been.

Two things earn their keep and one does not. An em dash reads as a longer, sharper pause than a comma, which is useful for an aside. A paragraph break gives you a landing place and a breath. A semicolon does neither, because there is no sound for it. Split it into two sentences and pick which half matters.

Use the words you actually use

Read a draft back and circle every word you would not say to someone standing in front of you.

The usual offenders: "utilise" for use, "in order to" for to, "prior to" for before, "additionally" and "moreover" for and or but, "leverage" for use again, "facilitate" for help. None of them are wrong. All of them signal that the sentence was written to be filed rather than said, and a listener hears the difference immediately even if they could not name it.

Use contractions. Written registers avoid them, and speech is full of them. "Don't", "we're", "it's", "you'll". Keep the full form only where the emphasis is the point: "we did not ship it" lands harder than "we didn't", precisely because it is not what you would normally say.

Pronouns have a range, and it is short

"It", "this", "that" and "they" need to point at something in the sentence before, or at most the one before that.

On a page, a pronoun can reach back a paragraph, because the reader's eye can go and check. Aloud, the referent has already gone. If more than one sentence has passed, name the thing again. Repeating a noun sounds slightly clumsy on the page and completely normal out loud, which tells you which medium you are writing for.

The same goes for lists. Say how many are coming, keep it to three, and mark them with "first", "then" and "last" rather than "firstly", "secondly" and "thirdly". Anything longer than three items is a list the listener stops counting, and it should probably be a sentence instead.

The first fifteen words

Whatever you have written as an opening, check whether the video actually starts after it.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the channel, hope you're all having a great week. So today I wanted to talk about something a few of you have been asking about in the comments.

That is thirty-eight words and it says nothing. Rewritten:

Three people this week asked how to stop a prompter from making them sound like a robot. Here is what actually causes it.

Twenty-four words, and the second one commits you to a subject. Greetings are not an opening. Put the subject first and greet people afterwards, if at all.

Length is arithmetic, not feel

You cannot judge duration by looking at a page of text, but you can calculate it exactly, because a script's length in time is its word count divided by your speaking rate.

At 140 words per minute:

• 30 seconds is about 70 words
• one minute is about 140 words
• three minutes is about 420 words
• five minutes is about 700 words
• ten minutes is about 1,400 words

Those numbers are smaller than most people expect, and a first draft is routinely a fifth over. Cut before you record, not in the edit. A cut in the edit costs you a jump or a reshoot. A cut in the draft costs nothing.

The stage shows the duration of whatever is in the box, worked out from the same speed the scroll is using, so the estimate and the actual roll are the same number. If you only want the estimate, the script timer does the same arithmetic on a page of its own.

Format it for a prompter, not for a document

A prompter scrolls plain text, and you will read whatever is on the line in front of you.

• Keep paragraphs short. Three or four lines gives you a break to land in and somewhere to pick up after a look at the lens.
• Leave the blank lines in. They are pauses, and they are also the thing that stops a long sentence arriving all at once.
• Drop tables, columns, footnotes and bracketed citations. None of them survive being read in a single column.
• Leave stage directions out. "PAUSE HERE" on its own line will eventually get read aloud on a take you liked. Put the pause in as a paragraph break, which does the same job and cannot be spoken.

If you want the notes anyway, keep them in a second script rather than in the one you read from. Several scripts sit side by side on the stage and you can switch between them, so a working copy and a clean read copy can both exist without one overwriting the other.

The loop, in order

1. Write it however it comes out. Do not edit while drafting.
2. Read it aloud once at your real pace and mark every stumble.
3. Cut a fifth. There is always a fifth.
4. Read it again at the speed you have set on the prompter.
5. Fix only what tripped you twice. Once is you; twice is the sentence.

That is four passes and it takes less time than one extra take.

When the script is right, the rest is delivery, and delivery has its own short list of fixes: how to read a teleprompter naturally covers the eye line, the speed and the phrase-ahead gap.