Teleprompter Script Format: Line Breaks You Can Read

A teleprompter script format is four decisions: how wide the line is, where it breaks, whether the breaths are marked, and whether the directions are still in the file. The width is the one people set; the break points are the one that decides whether you sound like you are reading.

A prompter app wraps on width. It fills the line until the next word will not fit, then starts a new one — which means a line can end on "the", "and" or "to".

That is audible. A reader who reaches the end of a line on "the" either pauses in the wrong place, or speeds up to find the noun before the scroll takes it away. Both are things a microphone catches and neither is a delivery problem — the script caused it.

The fix is to decide the breaks before the app sees the text. Sentence end first, clause boundary second, any other word last, and never mid-word.

Paste the script, set your width, and it reflows on that order of preference. Nothing is added or removed — every word comes back in the order you wrote it.

The width number is the one worth being deliberate about. Wide lines are the reason a presenter's eyes visibly track across the lens: the further the text runs, the further they have to move, and the camera sees it.

Broadcast prompters have historically used capitals, and the reason is distance — capitals stay legible on a screen further from the reader.

The cost is speed. Fluent reading relies partly on word shape, and capitals remove it: every word becomes a rectangle of the same height, so the reader is decoding letters rather than recognising words. The W3C's own accessibility guidance makes the same point about all-uppercase text being harder to read (W3C).

If you are reading from a phone at arm's length, you almost certainly do not need it. If your prompter is across the room, you probably do. It is a distance decision, not a style one.

Anything in brackets — [beat], [hold up the jar], [b-roll: the oven] — belongs in the script and not on the prompter.

The formatter keeps them on their own line and marks them, so they are easy to see and easy to delete. Do one of two things before the take: delete them, or use a prompter that can grey them out. Reading "beat" aloud in the middle of a sentence is the single most recoverable and most embarrassing prompter failure there is.

Those same directions are worth keeping in the master copy, because they are what a shot list is built from — see shot list template.

A prompter script that is thirty seconds too long is thirty seconds too long however well it is broken up. Read time comes first.

At a normal talking-head pace of around 150 words a minute, the formatter's estimate is words divided by pace — a floor rather than a promise, because it knows nothing about your pauses. A script that times perfectly on paper always runs longer on camera.

Price it at the pace you actually deliver at, then format. The full pace table is in words per minute speaking, and the beat-by-beat version — which tells you where the runtime is going rather than just the total — is in how to write a video script.

Paste your final draft into the teleprompter script formatter and read the first page aloud before you set up the camera.