The Dead Giveaway
You can always tell when someone is using a teleprompter poorly. Their eyes move left to right in a slow, deliberate sweep. Their blink rate drops. Their face is slightly blank—focused on reading rather than communicating. The words might be polished, but the delivery feels robotic.
The good news: every single one of these tells is fixable. None of them are inevitable. They're the result of bad setup and bad habits, not the teleprompter itself.
Rule #1: Position Matters More Than Anything
If your teleprompter text is anywhere except directly in front of your camera lens, you will look like you're reading. Your audience's eyes are sensitive to gaze direction—even a few degrees off-center is noticeable at normal viewing distances.
On a MacBook, the best position for teleprompter text is the notch at the top of the screen—right where the camera lives. An app like Avocado is designed specifically to use that space. When text is there, your eyes stay on the lens and your audience sees direct eye contact.
Rule #2: Don't Write the Way You Talk (Write How You'll Say It)
Reading a script written in formal prose will always sound like reading. Write your script the way you actually speak: short sentences, contractions, fragments where natural. Then read it out loud before recording. If any phrase feels unnatural in your mouth, rewrite it until it doesn't.
Rule #3: Use Pacing Cues
The flatness people associate with teleprompter delivery usually comes from relentless, unbroken reading. Real speech has pauses. It has breaths. It has moments where the speaker smiles before landing a line.
Build these into your script explicitly. Add a [pause] after a strong statement. Add a [breathe] before a long sentence. Avocado's Smart Cues feature does this automatically using on-device AI—it reads your script and injects these markers where they're most needed, so you don't have to think about it while recording.
Not sure what your natural pace actually is? Most people don't. Knowing your baseline WPM makes it much easier to judge whether your delivery needs slowing down.
Rule #4: Scroll Speed Is Personal
There's no universal "correct" scroll speed. It depends entirely on how fast you speak, the complexity of your content, and whether you're using bullet points or full sentences. Spend ten minutes dialing in your speed before your first real recording. Once it feels effortless to read without rushing or waiting, you've found your pace.
The Result
A well-configured teleprompter with good positioning, a naturally written script, and built-in pacing cues is invisible to your audience. They'll think you're just a confident, articulate person who knows exactly what they want to say. Which, with the right setup, you are.