Is Over-Rehearsal a Myth?

The website Teachable.com has a free slide show on how to improve your presentation. It is generally well written and it promotes the idea of avoiding bullet points and putting too much information on a slide.

But – on one of its slides, it claims that over-rehearsal is a myth – meaning that it is not a bad thing. Its main rationale is that actors spend a lot of time rehearsing their lines. That is true but it does not make over-rehearsing a myth. Here is why:

Actors have to memorize their lines because they are recreating a virtual reality that has been written by screen writers. The actors have no personal experience in that reality. The only way to get inside that role is to memorize the lines.

There is a BIG difference between that and telling your own story!

When you make a presentation on something you know something about, you are already living in that reality or you have lived in that reality. So you should be able to TELL YOUR STORY naturally without having the memorize every line of your story.Memorizing your own story will just make it soung robotic and not authentic.

So over-rehearsal is NOT a myth. It is a REAL problem for public speakers.