How to Use a Teleprompter Without Sounding Like You're Reading

Most people can tell within a sentence or two when someone on video is reading. Flat rhythm, a speed that never changes, and eyes that slide left to right across the frame all give it away. None of that is a talent problem. It comes down to four things you can fix: the speed, where the words sit relative to the camera, how the script is written, and how much you rehearse.

This guide covers each one, with the numbers behind them.

Start with the right speed

Teleprompter speed is easiest to think about in words per minute (wpm), because that is how speaking rate is measured.

A few reference points:

Context	Rate	Source
Average conversational English in the US	about 150 wpm	National Center for Voice and Speech
Recommended range for radio news	160–180 wpm	Rodero (2012), summarising the radio literature
Phone conversations between strangers, counting pauses	about 196 wpm on average (111–291 across calls)	Yuan, Liberman & Cieri (2006)

The phone figure surprises people. In the Switchboard corpus of recorded US phone calls, Yuan and colleagues found an average of 196 words a minute across whole conversations, and 236 once silences were cut out. Casual talk is quick. But the same study found that people speak more slowly with strangers than with friends and family, and more slowly as they get older. An audience on the other side of a camera is a room full of strangers, so a calmer pace than your kitchen-table speed is normal, not stiff.

Rodero's study of 40 news bulletins from the BBC, Radio France, RAI and RNE is a useful warning in the other direction. Against the 160–180 wpm that most radio writers recommend, only the BBC stayed in range; the Italian and Spanish bulletins were faster and paused less, and listeners' judgements of the news shifted with the speech rate.

So a sensible first setting is a little under 150. Our teleprompter starts at 140 words a minute for that reason, and goes from 60 to 250 in steps of 10. Do one test read, then nudge it with the up and down arrow keys while the text is moving. The speed you settle on is remembered next time.

Work out the length before you record

Because the rate is in words per minute, the read time is simple division: words ÷ wpm.

Script length	At 130 wpm	At 140 wpm	At 160 wpm
150 words	1 min 9 s	1 min 4 s	56 s
500 words	3 min 51 s	3 min 34 s	3 min 8 s
1,000 words	7 min 42 s	7 min 9 s	6 min 15 s

If a platform caps you at 60 seconds, that is roughly 140 to 160 words, not the 250 people often try to squeeze in. The teleprompter shows the read time for your script at your chosen speed above the preview, and paces the scroll so the last line reaches the reading line just as that time runs out.

Keep your eyes close to the lens

The biggest giveaway of a read is the eyes. Here the research is specific.

In a set of experiments at Stanford, Milton Chen (2002) measured how far someone on video could look away from the camera before viewers stopped feeling eye contact. The sensitivity turned out to be lopsided:

Looking up, left or right of the camera, the speaker could drift only about 1 degree before eye contact was lost.
Looking below the camera, viewers were about ten times less sensitive, with the drop-off around 10 degrees.
Viewers watching a recording were less likely to perceive eye contact than viewers in a live call with the same person.

Turn that into distances. One degree at 60 cm (a typical laptop distance) is about 1 cm. Ten degrees is about 10.5 cm. That gives you three practical rules:

Put the words below the lens, never above or beside it. On a laptop or a monitor with the webcam on top, move the reading line high up the screen. Our prompter puts it 30% from the top by default; you can raise it to 15% under More options.
Keep lines short. A 20 cm line read from 60 cm away makes your eyes sweep almost 10 degrees each way, far beyond the 1 degree viewers forgive sideways. Widen the side margins so the text sits in a narrow column under the camera.
Sit further back if you can. The same line looks narrower in degrees from further away. Make the text bigger and move your chair back, and the sweep shrinks.

Since recorded video is judged more strictly than a live call, aim to keep the reading line within a few centimetres of the lens rather than right at the 10-degree limit.

Glass rigs and mirror mode

A beam-splitter teleprompter solves the eye-line problem properly. The camera sits behind a sheet of angled glass, and a screen below reflects the text onto that glass, right in front of the lens. You look straight down the barrel while you read.

The catch is that a reflection reverses the text. Turn on Mirror (or press M) so it reads the right way round in the glass. If your screen is mounted upside down under the hood, add Flip (V). Press F for fullscreen so nothing else on the screen shows up in the reflection.

Write the script for the ear

A script that reads well on paper often sounds like a document when spoken. Some habits that help:

Use contractions. "It's", "you'll", "don't". Almost nobody says "do not" in conversation unless they're stressing it.
One idea per sentence. If a sentence needs a comma to breathe, it probably wants to be two sentences.
Put the point first. "Save the file before you close it" is easier to follow by ear than "Before closing it, make sure the file is saved."
Write numbers the way you'll say them. "About two and a half thousand" or "twenty-five forty", not "2,540", so you don't have to decide mid-sentence how to say it. The same goes for dates, prices and abbreviations.
Spell out anything you might stumble on. A tricky name can carry a phonetic hint in brackets.
Mark pauses with a blank line. The prompter keeps your line breaks, so an empty line becomes a visible gap, and a gap is a cue to stop and let the last point land.
Mark emphasis sparingly. A word in capitals or between asterisks is enough. If every line has emphasis, none of it does.

Read each paragraph aloud while you edit. Anywhere you trip, run out of breath or change a word without meaning to, rewrite it the way you just said it.

If you like drafting with headings and notes, write the script in the Markdown editor first. In the teleprompter, From the Markdown editor lists the pages saved in your browser and copies the one you choose into a new script as plain text, without the formatting marks.

Rehearse like you mean it

Two or three run-throughs make a bigger difference than any setting.

Read once for speed. Start at 140, read the whole script out loud, and adjust as you go: down arrow if you're chasing the text, up arrow if you're waiting for it. You want to be reading the line between the markers, not racing ahead or falling behind.

Read once for meaning. On the second pass, stop thinking about the words and think about the person you're talking to. Pick one real viewer and explain it to them. This is where your pace starts to vary naturally, slowing for the important bits and speeding through the familiar ones.

Stop worrying about following perfectly. A prompter moving at a fixed speed doesn't know you paused for effect. You have a few ways to stay in charge:

Press Space to pause and play. Many presentation clickers send Space, B, F5 or the full stop, and all of those work too.
Use the left and right arrows, or Page Up and Page Down, to jump back or forward a step.
On a phone or tablet, tap to pause and drag to move the text.
If someone else is running the prompter, Remote control window opens a small control panel in a second window of the same browser, handy when the prompter is fullscreen on another monitor.

Use the countdown. A 3, 5 or 10 second countdown gives you time to sit back, take a breath and look at the lens before the first line arrives.

Record a test and watch it with the sound off. Your eyes tell you more than your voice. If you can see them tracking side to side, narrow the column or sit further back. Then watch it with sound and no picture, and listen for the monotone. That usually means the script needs rewriting, not the reader.

Small setup details that help

Contrast. White on black is the default and the easiest to read on glass. Yellow on black and black on white are under More options.
Line spacing. A little extra spacing (the default is 1.5) stops you from jumping to the wrong line after a glance away.
Faded lines. Lines you've already read fade out towards the top, so your eye stays on the reading line.
Keep the screen awake. The prompter asks the browser to stop the screen from dimming while it's open, so a long take won't go dark halfway.

Scripts are saved only in your browser, on that device. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no account.

The short version

Start a little below 150 words a minute and adjust while you read.
Divide your word count by your speed to get the length: about 140–160 words per minute of video.
Put the text just below the lens, in a narrow column; sideways glances show after about 1 degree.
On a glass rig, turn on Mirror (M), and Flip (V) if the screen is upside down.
Write for the ear: contractions, short sentences, numbers as you'd say them, blank lines for pauses.
Rehearse twice, once for speed and once for meaning, then record a test and watch it muted.

Paste your script into the teleprompter and do a test read now. It takes two minutes and tells you more than any guide.

Sources

National Center for Voice and Speech. Voice Qualities (voice production tutorial): the average rate of speech for English speakers in the US is about 150 words per minute. ncvs.org
Yuan, J., Liberman, M., & Cieri, C. (2006). Towards an integrated understanding of speaking rate in conversation. Proceedings of Interspeech 2006. PDF, Linguistic Data Consortium
Rodero, E. (2012). A comparative analysis of speech rate and perception in radio bulletins. Text & Talk, 32(3). doi:10.1515/text-2012-0019
Chen, M. (2002). Leveraging the asymmetric sensitivity of eye contact for videoconferencing. Proceedings of CHI 2002. Stanford Graphics Lab
Read times and distance conversions (words ÷ wpm; 1° at 60 cm ≈ 1 cm) are our own arithmetic.