Can someone explain timing???

I suppose you are on CP8 or 9 where someone decided to hide the Timeline panel, which is really the most important panel in Captivate? Open it right away and leave it open all the time!

Give the user as much control as you want. If nothing is there to prevent it, the playhead will move on at a speed of 30 frames per second and continue. You have been putting up text and other objects on a slide, once they are all there, you have to insert a pausing point. In Captivate that is done by inserting an interactive object: a button, a click box, a shape button (or a Text Entry Box, but that is for more specific reasons). Each of them can have a pausing point, at the time you'll decide in the Timing Properties panel (also very important). When there is a pausing point in a slide, you'll see the pausing symbol on its timeline, the playhead will stop there and wait until that interactive object is clicked. When it is clicked, the Success action will be done. That could be 'Continue' or 'Go to Next Slide'. This is what you want, not to extend the duration of a slide to a estimated reading time.

Some quick ways to have such an interactive object on all slides:

1. Put a shape button on the main master slide, check that it has a pausing attached in the Options tab (only exception where pausing is not in the Timing Properties because objects on the Master slide do not have timing normally). If that is OK, that shape button will always pause at the end of each slide, whatever its duration, provided the main master slide objects are on that slide. That will be the case for most slides, with the exception of Title slides in some themes.
2. Put a click box on the first slide, time it for the rest of the slide (CTRL-E will do that trick). A click box is 'invisible' to the user, for that reason its pausing (Timing Properties) will always be at the end of its timeline, in this case at the end of the slide timeline. A click box cannot be put on a master slide. You can however copy that click box, select all other slides in the Filmstrip (CTRL-A) and paste the click box on all. If you make that click box the size of the slide, just clicking on the slide will execute the Success action of the click box, which you can set to Continue or Go to Next Slide.
3. If all slides have almost the same duration a third work flow could be a shape button on the first slide, with a pause late on its timeline (Timing Properties) and set this shape button to be timed for the rest of the project, Always on top. The advantage of this work flow is that the shape button will have a unique name (ID) and can be controlled by an action, if there are slides where you do not want that pausing (you can hide it using the On Enter action).

More information about the Timeline in this old post, most of it is still valid, although in CP9 the Effects timelines are integrated now in the normal Timeline panel, no longer in a dedicated Effects panel.

Tiny Timeline Tidbits - Captivate blog