No.  I plead with you; please do not try to read your presentation.

You may be tempted to think something like this, “This presentation is really important and I want to get it just right. I don’t want to screw up. It is an important audience and I’m going to be nervous and I’m afraid I might forget something. I haven’t had time to rehearse the presentation or memorize it, so if I read it, I won’t forget anything or make any mistakes. Besides, I’ve been reading my whole life, how hard could it be?”

I can sympathize with your thinking, but there are some serious flaws with the reasoning here. Reading a speech is actually an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well—it’s not for amateurs. While it is true that reading is a basic skill mastered by most first graders, reading a speech in front of a roomful of people is extremely difficult and is mastered by very few.

Here’s why. When you read a speech the following negative consequences occur.
1.    Your speaking speed becomes consistent which robs your voice of its conversational tones.
2.    Your volume becomes consistent.
3.    You don’t vary your pauses.
4.    You lose eye contact with your audience.
5.    You can’t see what your audience is reacting to positively or negatively.
6.    You become monotone.
7.    Everyone falls asleep.
8.    You communicate nothing.
Are you convinced yet?

When an amateur presenter announces that he or she is planning to read a speech it strikes me as absurd as a lifelong coach potato announcing that he wants to take up exercise so he is going to start by climbing Mt. Everest. Sure some trained experts can reach the top of Everest, but an amateur would die trying.

Network news anchors like Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams can read a presentation from a Teleprompter and make it sound natural not because they were born with this skill. They can do it because they have done it every day for the last quarter of a century and they still practice.
Ronald Reagan was a master at being able to read a speech and make it sound authentic, real and believable. Many people erroneously believe Reagan could do this because of skills he acquired as an actor. But it wasn’t the skills he learned that helped; it was the discipline. Most people don’t realize how much work Reagan put into delivering a major speech like the State of the Union Address.

For starters, Reagan would work intimately with the writing of various drafts with his speech writers over a period of months. Next, he would read the finished speech text out loud for three hours every night for a week in the residency above the Oval Office in the White House. Then, he would spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsals of the speech on the day it was to be delivered. It’s important to remember that he wasn’t doing this to memorize the speech. He was still reading the speech from the Teleprompter.

Reagan put all of this time and effort into the speech preparation because he realized it’s not just the words that count, it’s how you deliver them. Reagan’s goal was to read the words in such a way that you were never conscious or aware of him reading. Instead, you as the audience member could focus on the meaning of his words and get the sense that Reagan really believed his words.

So if you still want to read your speech, be my guest. But are you willing to put in as much rehearsal time as Reagan did?
I didn’t think so.
Reading full texts is difficult, dangerous and unnecessary. Instead, just rely on notes.