Reading a presentation versus memorizing a presentation—talk about a scenario where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Both options are horrible.

Let’s take a look at the reading option. At first blush, reading seems easy. After all, you’ve been reading your whole life. If you get nervous, all of your words are in front of you, so it seems like this is the safest route, right? Wrong!

Reading a presentation in front of people is the absolute dumbest thing you could ever do if your goal is to give a pretty good presentation because, unless you have been news anchor and reading a script for three hours a day for the last 20 years, you are going to be terrible. Why? When you read, you break your eye contact with your audience; you become flat, monotone, and boring; and you speak at the same speed.

Please keep in mind that reading a speech is really hard work. Even a master like former President Ronald Reagan would practice his State of the Union speech three hours a night for a week, and then still spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsal, all so he didn’t seem like he was reading a speech! I really don’t think you want to spend the time it takes to get good at reading a speech. And if you don’t spend all of that time, you will be awful and fall way short of your goal of being pretty good. So what’s the next option?

You could try to memorize your speech. Yea, right. In case you have forgotten middle school vocabulary tests or high school Spanish, memorizing stuff is really hard. Even if you’re good at memorizing words for a test, that doesn’t mean you are going to be able to recall information when you add in the tension associated with having to speak while a bunch of people are staring at you. Worst of all, even if you did successfully memorize your presentation, there is a great chance that you would sound canned, phony, flat, and robotic and memorized when people heard you. Yuck! No one would want to listen to you. There is a reason that Meryl Streep makes the big bucks. Acting is really hard if you do it in such a way that it doesn’t seem like you are obviously acting.

Take my word for it: you don’t want to memorize anything. It’s too difficult and fraught with peril.

So what’s the solution?

This article was taken from my new book "How to Give a Pretty Good Presentation" You can order a copy from Amazon.com or from your local bookstore.