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I have a 3-min presentation for a conference. I am an early researcher who has never done any presentation, so this will be my first.
Presentation is my weakness, and it is a challenge for me to give a smooth talk. I am feeling nervous.
Q: How common is to write out a script for a 3-min talk and just follow the papers?
If you literally read a script, word-for-word, and do not have a teleprompter, you are going to be looking down too much and not looking at your audience enough.
Even if you write a script, it would be better to have notes that help you keep the main points in order, and practice until you can give the complete talk in the required time just glancing occasionally at your notes.
Reading from a script is not a common practice, but should be completely OK for an early-career (and even more experienced) researcher if it helps them, not only to memorise what they wants to say, but more important, to give a good presentation to the audience.
This technique could be very useful for people who have little or no presentation experience, have some fear of public speaking, or are not so articulate in the presentation language (e.g., not their native language).
The "speaker's notes" feature in many presentation tools (e.g., Powerpoint) is there to be used by the speaker (if needed). For each slides, you can put either the key points to remember or the whole script. For the latter, try to make a structured (e.g., bullet points) 2:45-minute script, and highlight the key points in bold/colors -- could be easier for you to memorize and follow, then practice the script and improve it as needed.
But in order to give a smooth presentation experience for the audience, you still need to take care of the other aspects of your presentation skills (e.g., good slides, body language, eye contact, effective pointing at figures/tables on the slides while reading from notes, etc).
Practice, practice, practice! To directly answer your question: no, it is neither common nor advisable to simply read from a page at a conference. If it were, we'd all just hand out slips of paper or email paragraphs of text and not bother with real people talking. Giving a three minute presentation is not easy. Even for people who make it look easy, it's not -- that comes after lots of practice. I've been giving talks for a long time, and still I always write out beforehand what I'll say and practice it -- the words, the timing, etc. If you're new to this, and it's a 3-minute talk, you should be rehearsing this repeatedly, by yourself and with others (e.g. group-mates).
