Is it good for the speaker to read notes during a presentation?

Twenty years ago it was not at all uncommon at international conferences in physics and electrical engineering to attend at "read" presentations, especially from old researchers from Asian countries who were not used to speak English.

How was it? Boring, utterly boring, and audiences drifted away. Please don't do or suggest it: if you feel uncomfortable speaking, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

So if a speaker makes notes and just reads them properly along with the slides, how will it look? Will audiences accept or criticise such presentations?

It will not leave the best impression, but you will survive it.

The biggest problem, however, is the word properly: Reading a talk or speech in a manner that is equivalent to ad-libbing is an art of its own and if you have mastered it, you usually do not need it anymore (unless you are a politician, actor or similar). If you have no experience in this manner and are nervous on top, you will almost certainly make frequent mistakes with respect to emphasis, tone and rhythm, usually by losing them altogether. This will make it difficult for the audience to follow your talk and very likely be worse than trying to give a regular talk.

Another problem is that writing a talk is not as simple as it may seem, as spoken language crucially differs from written one: Sentences are shorter and simpler; certain grammatical constructions only work well in written language; other aspects are exclusive to spoken language and essential for a good talk. A simple example for the latter is using the word here and pointing at the proper part of the projection.

Here is roughly what I recommend:

• Learn the first one or two sentence of your talk by heart and memorise important aspects of the next few ones. This should give you a safe start and way to cope with your nervousness. What is important is that you have a smooth transition from fully memorised sentences to ad-libbing. If you don’t, you may get stuck at the transition point.

• Rehearse early and often. This way you can spot difficult passages and prepare ways to master them, e.g., make mental notes on how to do a transition, look up vocabulary that you lack, and so on.

  After a few runs, rehearse in front of an audience that can give you some feedback – even if it’s your ten-year old brother who does not understand a word you are saying and can only comment on the impression you are leaving (an audience that can give you feedback on the content is better though). This also forces you to rehearse the actual talk situation and makes you avoid starting all over on a regular basis. Most importantly, rehearsing is one of the best wards against nervousness.

  Mind you: rehearse not memorise entirely. A talk that is entirely recited from memory is as bad as a talk that is entirely read from notes.

• Learn to use your slides as a memory aid. Avoid putting full sentences on slides, because you may read them out during your talk (and your audience does not want to read full sentences either).

I am talking about the field of Atmosphere, where many proper wordings are necessary to address the originality of one's work.

I am not in your field, but I am skeptical that this extends beyond using the proper vocabulary and keywords – which you can put on your slides as a memory aid and to tell your audience about them in case you forget to mention them.

At least in my field, mathematics, in the U.S. (and probably western Europe) it is stylistically quite undesirable to read from slides, because it makes a person look as though they haven't really assimilated the material. For that matter, I've occasionally wondered who actually wrote those slides that the speaker treats as mysterious, surprising, or baffling.

On the other hand, there are indeed possibly even-worse failures, such as becoming completely tongue-tied, incoherent, panic-attacked, etc. But this scenario won't make a good impression on anyone, in any case.

If one's command of the relevant language is so minimal that one can do no better than to read the slides... it still may be better to not read all the slides, but just emphasize the high points, rather than look a bit silly. After all, people can/will read the slides themselves.

In particular, ideally, the audio portion complements the video. They are different mediums. Formulas are best displayed, not spoken. Complicated English (or other) sentences are best spoken, not filling up a slide with small print that makes people squint to read it... Graphics go on slides...