A woman came up to me after a keynote in Innsbruck and said something that I took as the highest compliment I have ever received as a performer.
“You’re a natural,” she said. “Some people just have that gift. You just get up there and talk and it flows.”
I thanked her. I did not tell her that the “natural” flow she had just watched was the product of four months of writing, rewriting, recording, listening, cutting, adding, restructuring, recording again, performing at smaller events, transcribing, comparing, editing, rehearsing, and performing again until every word sounded like it had just occurred to me for the first time.
I did not tell her because the goal of all that work was precisely her reaction. The goal was to make the writing disappear. To produce words that sounded so natural, so spontaneous, so effortlessly conversational that no one in the audience would ever suspect they had been written down, agonized over, and polished to a shine.
The ultimate compliment for a scripted performance is: “That didn’t sound scripted.”
Scott Alexander captures this principle in his lecture notes, Standing Up On Stage, with a phrase I have adopted as my north star: “scripted but not scripty.” You should know every word you are going to say on stage. But you must deliver those words as if they are forming in your mind for the first time. The audience should never see the seams. They should see a person thinking out loud, not a person reciting.
This sounds simple. It is brutally difficult.
The Problem Chain
Alexander identifies a problem chain that explains why so many performers sound scripted even when they are doing everything else right. The chain goes like this, and each link causes the next.
It starts with sounding scripted. You memorized your lines, and the memorization shows. The words come out with the flat, even cadence of someone reading from an internal teleprompter rather than someone thinking in real time. There is no variation in rhythm, no unexpected pauses, no moments where the performer seems to search for the right word — because they already know the right word. They always know the right word. And that certainty, paradoxically, sounds wrong. It sounds artificial. Human beings do not speak with perfect fluency. We hesitate. We rephrase. We circle back. When someone speaks with zero hesitation, our subconscious registers it as rehearsed.
Sounding scripted leads to speaking too fast. When you are reciting memorized lines rather than thinking in real time, there is no cognitive friction to slow you down. A person who is genuinely thinking has natural pauses — the brain needs time to form thoughts into words. A person who is reciting has no need for those pauses, because the thoughts are already formed. So the pace accelerates. Not because you intend to speak quickly, but because there is nothing to slow you down.
Speaking too fast leads to blowing through jokes. Comedy depends on timing, and timing depends on pauses. A joke needs a setup, a beat of silence, and then the punchline. If you are speaking too fast because you sound scripted because you are reciting memorized lines, there is no beat of silence. The setup runs directly into the punchline. The audience has no time to form the expectation that the punchline will subvert. The laugh dies before it is born.
Blowing through jokes leads to stepping on beats. Every strong moment in a performance needs space around it — space before, so the audience is ready, and space after, so they can respond. When you are steamrolling through your material at recitation speed, you step on those beats. You deliver the next line before the audience has finished reacting to the current one. The whole performance feels rushed, breathless, and oddly unsatisfying.
One problem causes the next causes the next causes the next. The root cause is sounding scripted. Everything else is a downstream consequence. Fix the root, and the chain breaks.
Why It Sounds Written
Before I figured out how to make my scripts sound unwritten, I needed to understand why they sounded written in the first place. And the answer turned out to be embarrassingly simple.
Written language and spoken language are different. Not slightly different. Fundamentally different. And I was writing scripts in written language.
When I sat down to write my script, I wrote the way I write emails, reports, and blog posts. Complete sentences. Proper grammar. Logical paragraph structure. Clear transitions. The kind of language that looks elegant on paper.
But nobody speaks like that. Not in conversation, not in casual interaction, not in any context where language is genuinely spontaneous. Real speech is fragmented. Real speech has false starts. Real speech has contractions, colloquialisms, sentence fragments, and thoughts that begin in one direction and end in another. Real speech breaks grammatical rules constantly and nobody notices because that is how human communication actually works.
When I delivered my grammatically perfect, structurally elegant, beautifully written script, it sounded written. Because it was written. For the page, not for the mouth.
The first technique I learned was to stop writing and start talking. Instead of sitting at a desk composing sentences, I would stand in my hotel room and speak the ideas out loud as if I were explaining them to someone. Not performing. Just talking. And then I would write down what I said.
The result was messier. Less grammatical. Less elegant on the page. Sentence fragments. Repeated words. Odd rhythms. But when I spoke those words back, they sounded like a person talking. Because they were the words of a person talking.
The Contraction Test
One of the simplest diagnostics I developed for detecting written-sounding language is the contraction test. Read through your script and look for any place where you wrote the full form of a word that people normally contract.
“I am going to show you something” — nobody says that. People say “I’m going to show you something.” “You will not believe what happens next” — sounds like a press release. People say “You won’t believe.” “Do not open the envelope yet” — an instruction manual. People say “Don’t open the envelope yet.”
When you find full forms in your script, you have found writing. Replace them with contractions and the line immediately sounds more like speech. It is a small change with a disproportionate impact because contractions are one of the primary markers our brains use to distinguish written language from spoken language.
The Three-Sentence Rule
Another technique I use is what I think of as the three-sentence rule. If I have a thought that takes more than three sentences to express, I break it up.
Written language can sustain long, complex sentences because the reader can go back and reread. Spoken language cannot. The listener gets one pass. If a sentence is too long or too complex, they lose the thread and disengage.
When I find myself writing a five-sentence block that develops a single idea, I break it into pieces. I deliver the first part, then pause. I might comment on it. I might ask a question. I might make eye contact and let the thought land. Then I deliver the next part. The content is the same, but the delivery creates breathing room for the audience and gives the material the rhythm of conversation rather than the rhythm of a lecture.
The “Would I Say This to a Friend?” Test
This is my most-used quality check. For every line in my script, I ask: would I say this to a friend if I were telling them this story over coffee?
If the answer is yes, the line stays. If the answer is no — if the line is too formal, too grand, too performed, too clever — it needs rewriting. Because the moment a line sounds like something a performer would say rather than something a person would say, the audience detects the performance. The seams show. The illusion of spontaneity fractures.
This test catches a lot of problems. It catches lines that are too poetic for casual speech. It catches vocabulary that people use in writing but not in conversation. It catches sentence structures that feel natural on paper but sound alien in the air.
One of my scripts had the line: “The human mind possesses a remarkable capacity for pattern recognition.” True statement. Interesting idea. Sounds like a textbook. I would never say that to a friend. I would say: “Your brain is crazy good at spotting patterns.” Same idea. Different register. The second version sounds like something a human being would actually say out loud.
Building in the Pauses
The problem chain starts with sounding scripted, and the first downstream effect is speaking too fast. The antidote to speaking too fast is pausing. But you cannot just decide to pause more during a performance — you will forget, because the momentum of the memorized text will carry you forward like a current.
So I build the pauses into the script itself.
I use ellipses and dashes in my written script to mark where I want to pause. Not where grammar says I should pause, but where the performance needs breath. Before a reveal. After a joke. In the middle of a sentence that I want to land with weight. Any moment where silence is more powerful than words.
When I rehearse, I honor those marks as strictly as I honor the words. The pauses are not suggestions. They are scripted elements. They are written into the performance as deliberately as any line of dialogue. And because they are rehearsed, they survive the pressure of live performance. They do not get swallowed by momentum. They are part of the memorized pattern, not something I have to remember to add.
The pauses are what make the scripted words sound unscripted. They reintroduce the cognitive friction that real speech has and memorized speech lacks. They create the impression that the speaker is thinking — choosing the next word, considering the right way to phrase something — even though the next word was chosen months ago.
The Rehearsal That Removes Rehearsal
There is a stage in the rehearsal process that I think of as the stage where the script dies and the performance is born. It happens somewhere around the twentieth or thirtieth full run-through, and it feels like a gear shifting.
For the first fifteen run-throughs, you are saying your lines. You are aware of the script as a memorized text. Then, somewhere around the twentieth, something shifts. You stop saying lines and start having thoughts. The words become automatic enough that they no longer require conscious attention, and your focus moves to the meaning behind the words.
This is the moment the script becomes invisible. Not because you forgot it, but because it became so deeply embedded that it operates below consciousness. The way you do not think about individual letters when you write your name. The script becomes muscle memory for your mouth. And at that point, the words sound natural because they are indistinguishable from thoughts forming in real time.
The Test That Matters
After all of this work — the talking-first drafting, the contraction test, the three-sentence rule, the friend test, the built-in pauses, the twenty-plus rehearsals — there is one final test. It happens in front of an audience.
After the show, I listen for the compliment. Not the “great show” compliment. That is generic and tells me nothing. I listen for the specific compliment that tells me the script has disappeared.
“You seem so natural up there.”
“It felt like you were just talking to us.”
“That did not feel like a performance.”
“You’re a natural.”
When I hear those words, I know the writing has done its job. The hours of crafting sentences in hotel rooms, of recording and listening and rewriting and rehearsing — all of it was aimed at producing the experience of no writing at all. The best scripts are the ones nobody knows exist.
Scripted but not scripty. Every word chosen, every pause placed, every line tested against the question of whether a real person would really say it. And then delivered with enough rehearsal that the choosing and the placing and the testing vanish, and all that remains is a person, on stage, apparently thinking out loud.
That is the craft. Make it look like there is no craft. Write it so well that it sounds like it was never written.