The most common reason a teleprompter read sounds stiff is not the prompter and not the delivery. It is that the script was written the way people write, and spoken language and written language are genuinely different systems.
Written prose can carry subordinate clauses, parenthetical asides and sentences that only resolve at the full stop, because a reader can go back. A listener cannot. Everything below follows from that single constraint.
Write short sentences, then cut them shorter
A sentence you can say in one breath is a sentence a listener can hold in their head. Once it runs past about twenty words, they are still parsing the opening while you deliver the end, and comprehension drops even though every individual word is clear.
The practical test: read it aloud and mark where you naturally breathe. If you run out of air before a full stop, the sentence is too long — not for you, for them.
One idea per line
This is a formatting rule with a delivery payoff. Break your script so each line carries a single thought, even when several lines form one sentence. On a scrolling prompter, a line becomes a unit your eye takes in at a glance, which frees you to look at the lens between them.
It also exposes weak writing. A line that cannot stand as one thought is usually a line doing two jobs badly, and splitting it almost always improves the sentence as well as the read.
Use contractions and the words you actually say
Say "you'll" rather than "you will", "it's" rather than "it is". Formal writing avoids contractions; speech is full of them, and a script without them sounds like a legal notice no matter how well you read it.
The same goes for vocabulary. If you would say "use" in conversation, do not write "utilise". Read your script and circle every word you would not say to a colleague at lunch — those are the words that will make you sound like you are reading.
Structure: give them the shape first
A listener who does not know where you are going spends their attention guessing instead of following. Tell them the shape early — "there are three things that matter here" — and they can slot everything that follows into place.
This is why the hook and the roadmap sit at the front of almost every well-made video. Not because attention spans are short, but because a listener who knows the structure can afford to relax into the detail.
Write in your own rhythm, not a generic one
Everyone has verbal habits: sentence lengths they favour, ways they open a point, phrases they return to. A script that fights those habits is harder to deliver than one that leans into them, and the difference is audible.
The quickest way to find yours is to record two minutes of yourself explaining the topic with no script at all, transcribe it, and read it back. It will be a mess structurally, but the phrasing is yours. Keep the phrasing, fix the structure.
The read-aloud test catches what editing misses
Read the finished script out loud, at full volume, standing up. Every awkward construction, tongue-twisting consonant cluster and unintentional rhyme surfaces immediately. Reading silently catches none of them, because your inner voice smooths over exactly the problems you are looking for.
Do the final pass at the scroll speed you will record at. Timing problems only appear at speed — a paragraph that reads fine slowly can turn out to have nowhere to breathe.
Plan the length before you record, not after
At a normal conversational pace of 130 to 150 words per minute, a five-minute video is around 700 words and a thirty-second clip is around 75. Knowing this before you write saves the demoralising experience of cutting a finished script in half. The script timer works it out for you if you would rather not do the arithmetic.
Add fifteen to twenty percent for anything with a live audience, since laughter, pauses and questions all consume real time that a word count cannot see.