Gestures when speaking are excellent ways to emphasize or help to create ideas of how something looked, but -- never -- use gestures when you are reading printed material and are not looking at your audience.
I recently saw one excellent reader make this mistake. But his head was buried in his written material (It is a good idea even when reading to somebody to pause and look around quickly at your audience once in a while.), but his hands where waving around in some gesture like the hand on a old wind mill that was about to break off and fall to the ground.
Needless to say the gestures were not only useless they made him look ridiculous. Too bad. He was an excellent reader with a lot of warmth and feeling.
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