Reading well: listen to yourself
When I first started reading in public, I wore glasses all the time (I now tend to wear contacts most of the time) and I don’t have a very pronounced bridge on my nose. This meant my glasses regularly tended to slide down my nose, and I had unconsciously developed the habit of pushing them back up my nose at regular intervals, even if they had barely slipped at all. For some people, this was a distracting form of punctuating the reading, and I needed a kind critical friend to tell me I was doing it. I found a way of adjusting them once in a pause before I began reading, and then making sure I didn’t do it again. The first thing that will help you read well is having a critical friend in the congregation. They can observe you when you are actually reading, and tell you honestly both what you are doing well, and whether there are things you should try to change. It helps if, from time to time, they can sit in a different place, including at the back of the church (th...