Rehearsal is necessary because presenters must be:
- Demonstrably able to gather relevant ideas and formulate them into a script for speaking.
- Demonstrably able to deliver from a prepared script eloquently and audibly and to adjust those factors to audience size.
- Demonstrably able to perform using all props necessary to inform and convince an audience.
That last point is crucial to good presentation. Too many harassed presenters use either Keynote or Power Point as prompts for their unrehearsed, inaudible, often un-briefed information. Such paltry pretences cannot justifiably be thought of as presentations.
Time spent preparing such wordy visuals would much better be spent rehearsing aloud the material they contain in corridors, on the way home or in the bath, and then using your chosen software package to create a few, key visuals to make pertinent points at relevant moments during the performance of an actual presentation.
Since the advent of cell phones (delightfully misheard as ‘self phones’ by a friend whose first language is not English) no one thinks that people who walk around talking to themselves are mad. Would be presenters can therefore rehearse lines as loudly as they choose in any public place!