How to practice a presentation at home with your iPhone

Reading silently feels faster and smoother than speaking. Your eyes skip words your mouth can't, and the sentences that look fine on paper are often the ones you trip over. Saying the talk aloud, at full voice, shows you three things you can't see any other way:

• How long it really takes. Spoken presentations almost always run longer than people expect.
• Which sentences are hard to say. If you stumble on a phrase twice, rewrite it.
• Where you lose your place. Those are the transitions to strengthen, or the spots to keep a short note.

1. 1Count the words of your talk. Notes, Pages and most word processors show a word count.
2. 2Find your speaking pace: read a paragraph aloud for one minute and count the words. Many people land around 120–160 words per minute when presenting.
3. 3Divide the word count by your pace to get the running time. A 1,200-word talk at 130 words per minute is about nine minutes.
4. 4Leave room. Aim to finish a minute or so under your slot; pauses, questions and nerves all add time.

If the talk is too long, cut a whole example or point rather than speeding up. Talking faster is the first thing an audience notices. Our guide on words per minute goes deeper into measuring your pace.

You don't need special equipment. A practice session with built-in apps looks like this:

1. 1Put your talk in Notes, with a blank line between parts, so you can see where each section starts.
2. 2Open Clock › Stopwatch and time a first read-through out loud. Write the time at the top of the note.
3. 3Record an audio run in Voice Memos and listen back on a walk. Your ears catch filler words and rushed endings that you never notice while speaking.
4. 4Film a full run-through with the Camera app: front camera, phone at eye level on a stand or a pile of books, about an arm's length away. Stand if you'll stand on the day.
5. 5If your slides are in Keynote, its Rehearse Slideshow option lets you practise with your slides, presenter notes and a timer on screen.

The weak spot of this setup is reading: holding the phone while you film, or glancing down at Notes, breaks eye contact and the scroll is up to you.

Watching yourself is uncomfortable for everyone. Make it useful by checking one thing at a time instead of judging the whole video:

• Pace: do you speed up when nervous, or rush the last sentence of each part?
• Filler words: count the “um”, “so” and “like”. A silent pause sounds far more confident than a filler.
• Pauses: do you stop to let an important point land, or run every sentence together?
• Eye contact: how often are you looking at the lens versus down at your notes?
• The first and last 30 seconds: they are what people remember. They should be your strongest, smoothest lines.

Write down two things to improve, not ten. Then record again.

Running the whole talk every time wastes your energy on the parts that are already fine. Practise in sections instead:

• Split the talk into parts — the opening, each main point, the close — and rehearse the shakiest part three times in a row.
• Learn the first and last lines by heart. With a strong start and a clean finish, the middle can be said in your own words. Our guide on memorising a script explains how much to learn.
• Practise the transitions: the sentence that moves you from one point to the next is where most people lose their place.
• Finish with one or two full run-throughs so the parts join up, ideally the day before, not the hour before.

Talkzy turns the built-in setup into one screen, so you can rehearse looking at the lens instead of at your notes.

• Paste or import your talk and start a line with # for each part. The script list shows the word count and how long it takes at your speed, so you know right away whether it fits the slot.
• The script scrolls in a narrow column right under the front camera. With voice-follow it keeps your pace and waits when you pause; recognition runs on the device.
• Every run-through is saved as its own take. Mark the best one as a keeper, and after a stumble retake from where you stopped or from the start of the section.
• After a take, the speaking coach shows your words per minute, filler words, long pauses and how closely you followed the script, all on the device, with a simple score so you can see the trend.
• Rehearsing for a live talk? Prompter only mode shows the script full screen on an iPad or second phone, and a Bluetooth page-turner or keyboard can move through it — practise with the same clicker you'll use on the day.

Keep every attempt until you're done, and compare the first take with the last. Seeing the difference is the best cure for nerves. Delete the rest once you have the version you want to keep, or save the best one to Photos to send to a colleague or teacher for feedback.