How to rehearse a presentation

To rehearse a presentation, say the whole thing out loud on your feet with a timer running, then run it again twice with a narrower job each time: once for timing, once for the transitions, and a short session for the questions. Record one full run and watch it back. That is the whole method, and the rest of this article is how to run each pass so it actually changes the talk.

The reason silent reading does not count is simple. Reading is faster than speaking, it skips the transitions, and it never makes you find a word under pressure. The University of North Carolina’s Learning Center puts it plainly: speak out loud, at the volume you will use on the day, because reciting quietly hides the problems you are rehearsing to find.

Rehearsal is out loud or it is not rehearsal

Before the three passes, do one read through. Sit down, start a timer, and speak the talk from your notes without stopping to fix anything. You are answering one question: does this fit the slot?

If a 30 minute talk comes in at 42 minutes on the read through, no amount of polish will save it. Cut first. The thesis defence presentation is twelve slides for a 30 minute viva, and it gets there by giving each of three results chapters exactly one slide. A candidate who arrives with three slides per chapter finds out at the read through, not in front of the examiners.

Toastmasters’ advice on preparing a speech is to rehearse frequently and use a timer to pace the talk. Both halves matter. Frequency builds fluency; the timer tells you whether the fluency is fitting in the room you have.

Pass one: timing

Stand up, because standing changes your breathing and your pace. Present at full speed from the slides you will actually use, and write down the clock at every structural slide.

Structural slides are the dividers, the agenda and the close. The conference talk deck has two chapter dividers, at slides two and five, so a speaker rehearsing it gets three checkpoints: the first divider, the second divider and the closing slide. If the second divider arrives at minute 19 of a 30 minute slot, you know which half grew.

The TEDx speaker guide’s instruction is to practise with the clock winding down in front of you until you hit the time every time. A countdown is better than a stopwatch for this pass, because it shows what is left rather than what has gone, which is the number you need when you are deciding whether to tell the second story.

When the timing is off, cut content, not pace. The table under this article allows for cuts after pass one for exactly this reason.

Pass two: transitions

This pass is short and it does the most work. Go through the deck saying only the last line of one slide and the first line of the next, slide by slide, in order.

Transitions are where talks fall apart, because they are the sentences nobody writes down. You know what slide six says; you do not know how you get there from slide five. Drilling just the handovers turns twelve separate slides into one talk.

The thesis defence deck shows why this matters. Slide nine is limitations and slide ten is contribution, and the move between them is the hardest sentence in the viva: it has to concede the weaknesses and then claim something anyway. The deck’s own advice is to rehearse the limitations slide hardest. A transition drill is how you do that without running the whole thirty minutes again.

The University of Kansas’s open textbook on public speaking adds a practical point: rehearse with everything you will speak with, including your notes and the clicker. If the handover involves pressing a key and looking down at a note, practise pressing the key and looking down at the note.

Record yourself once

One recorded run is worth three more unrecorded ones. Watch it back once with a notepad and list only the habits that happen more than once: a filler word, a slide you turn your back to, a point where you speed up.

UNC’s guidance is to record yourself, listen, list what to improve and practise again. The University of Kansas textbook frames the same step as a self assessment and suggests looking for choices that emerge more than once, because a single stumble is noise and a repeated one is a habit.

Do not watch it three times. The first viewing finds the habits; the second starts to find your face, which helps nobody.

The keynote presentation is a good deck to judge a recording against, because four of its twelve slides carry almost no words. On a recording you can see whether the speaker held those near empty slides long enough for the story, or rushed to the next one because silence felt uncomfortable.

Pass three: the questions

Write down the five questions you least want to be asked. Give them to a colleague and have them ask in random order, without warning. Answer each in under a minute.

The closing slide of the thesis defence deck restates the three sub-questions as starting points: the slope, the tree types or the programme. Examiners tend to open with whatever is on the screen, so the candidate has quietly nominated the ground to rehearse. Any talk can do the same thing with its last slide, and it turns an unpredictable session into a rehearsable one.

How many rehearsals, and when to stop

There is no fixed number. Nancy Duarte reports spending about eighteen hours rehearsing an eighteen minute TEDx talk, and quotes the observation that shorter talks need more preparation per minute, not less. A thirty minute internal update does not need that, but the direction holds: the shorter the slot, the less room there is to recover from a wobble.

A usable stopping rule: stop full runs when you have hit your time twice in a row and the transition drill has no stumbles. After that, extra full rehearsals start to flatten the delivery. The same textbook suggests increasing the pressure gradually instead, from rehearsing alone to rehearsing in front of one friend, then a few colleagues.

On the day, only say the opening aloud. The first three sentences are where nerves hit hardest and the rest follows from them.

Common mistakes

• Rehearsing in the editor. You will present from a full screen view with a notes window, not from a canvas with a slide rail. Rehearse from the same view you will use.
• Speeding up to fit. A talk that is four minutes long in rehearsal is a talk with one section too many.
• Only rehearsing the content slides. Midway through the customer training deck, learners do one workflow on their own phones. Rehearse what you do and say while the room is working.
• Skipping the room check. Screen resolution, a second display set to mirror instead of extend, and a popup blocker are all found in ten minutes on the day before, or in front of the audience.
• Writing notes as a script. A script gets read. The pattern in how to write speaker notes keeps each slide to four short lines you can glance at.

Build it

Rehearse in present mode, because it is what the audience sees. Arrow keys, Space, Page Down or j move forward; the left arrow, Page Up or k go back; Home and End jump to the first and last slide; F toggles full screen and Esc closes. Press N to show the notes, and pop them out into a second browser window titled Speaker notes, which carries the note and the slide number out of the total. You drag that window to your own screen once. The presenter view page covers that setup, and what presenter view is explains the idea if you are new to it.

For the recorded run, present mode can record the talk as a WebM file at 30 frames a second, at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, with an optional camera overlay and microphone. It counts down from three, pauses and resumes, and downloads the file to your machine. Recording and the pen tools are paid features, and recording needs a current browser: Chrome or Edge 102, Firefox 111 or Safari 17.4 and later. The steps are in the guide to recording a presentation with voiceover. If you want a rough time before the first read through, the speaking time calculator estimates it from your word count.