Why your talking-head sounds like you’re reading (and how I fixed mine)

For a while I felt cheated. I was using a teleprompter and people still said “sounds fake” / “you’re reading.”

I slowed the scroll. Bigger font. Nothing. The bug wasn’t the scroll — it was the text. I had written an essay for eyes, then forced my mouth to perform it.

Symptoms of “script face”

Three “furthermore / thus / in order to” per sentence
Every line weighted the same — no peaks
No “you,” only “users should”
A sudden commercial at the end: “Click the link below!”

If your script sounds like a manual, a teleprompter just scrolls the manual politely.

The rewrite habits that helped

Cut long sentences in half

Before:

By planning your time carefully and reducing unnecessary distractions, we can create content more efficiently.

After:

Close a few tabs.
Your video will show up sooner.

Short lines give you air. They give the viewer a place to land.

Write to one impatient person

I picture my sister asking, “So what do you want me to do?”

Every section has to answer that. If it can’t, I delete it.

Swap formal words for words you’d actually say

“Users should mind the lighting” → “Don’t light from straight above — you’ll look mad.”
“It is recommended that you try” → “Tonight, just try this once.”

Too casual? Good. Talking-heads aren’t memos.

Mark the pauses in the script

I literally type:

Pause.
This part is simple.

When the teleprompter hits “Pause,” I shut up for half a second. That silence does more than another adjective.

A 60-second skeleton you can steal

Hook (8s): Have you also ___?
Stakes (10s): I used to ___, and it cost me ___.
Method (30s): Now I only do three steps — one, two, three.
Close (12s): Today, finish step one. Go.

Fill details into the bones. Don’t reverse it: pile details first and pray a point appears.

Need a draft faster? Let the AI script tool spit a structure, then rewrite it out loud. The test: could you say this to a friend without laughing at yourself?

Ugly practice that works

Paste into a teleprompter, read loud, record with your phone.
On playback, listen for one thing only: which line makes you want to skip. Cut it or split it.

After three rounds, it usually stops sounding like homework.

Fake often isn’t bad acting. It’s a script that refuses to be human.

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