I don't consider myself a great speaker by any means, but yes, I do find myself pre-editing my sentences when I give a talk. Prewritten talks are no exception.

I don't consider myself a great speaker by any means, but yes, I do find myself pre-editing my sentences when I give a talk. Prewritten talks are no exception. I always need to edit them on the fly to suit the audience and the context. If natural speech were a modern programming language, prewriting would be analogous to compiling to bytecode. Then you JIT compile it again when you speak. You rarely go directly from source code to machine language, perhaps because there's so much diversity among the "machines" (humans). Heck, I even "transpile" my talks from time to time. The last time I gave a presentation, my paper was written in English but I had to present it in Korean! Needless to say, that wasted a lot of brain cycles.