Page 194 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

HOW TO USE TELEPROMPTERS 185

You may have noticed that this technique requires a kind of
horizontal version of the up-down-up protocol that you read about
in the last chapter. If you don’t happen to have a teleprompter at your
disposal, and you don’t have a professional coach, practicing up-
down-up in front of a mirror at home will help prepare you for the
teleprompter.
In the unlikely event that the equipment fails, always have a text
copy (properly formatted—see previous chapter) with you at the lec-
tern. You may want to put a green or red dot in the scrolling “crawl”
text to signal you when to slide your hard copy page over—just in
case the crawl suddenly disappears. At that point, you had better
have some familiarity with the prepared text delivery skills we
talked about earlier, because to go straight from the teleprompter
and the GO ZONE to reading a text verbatim on the lectern in the
NO ZONE can look like the rhetorical version of a train wreck.