0179 – If *You* Don’t Understand It…

2021.06.28-0179 – If *You* Don’t Understand It…

It may be at this stage, or certainly after you have read the item a couple more times that those questions are still unanswered. It is rare to go on air and reading something that you do not understand yourself. You are the conduit of the content from say, a reporter or a copywriter to a listener. You have to understand the story or the message to be able to inject it with a tone of natural relevance. If questions are raised in your mind, then the same ones might be asked by the listener, and while they muse on that they will miss the tagline or the next item.

Film star Johnny Johnson was involved in an ugly scene with fellow actor Dwayne Dawson outside a Hollywood restaurant today. Johnson called Dawson a has-been, and Dawson responded by casting doubt on Johnson’s parentage. He said he would sue.

Who’s suing who? If you don’t know because of clumsy copywriting, how can you read with relevance and interpretive intonation?

Spoken language was the first form of communication between human beings. It came long before written language and so reading is a strange concept. We are not naturally predisposed to looking at squiggly hieroglyphics on a sheet of dried wood-pulp, and interpreting them into sounds and meaning.

To summarise: Do you understand what it is you are being asked to say? Your script is not a series of statements or phrases, they connect. You are not reading words off a page, you are trying to communicate a concept to people who are listening, using the words on the page. You have to read and understand it first, and tell people what you’ve just understood.

If necessary, and if allowed (obviously not in a commercial situation, but likely possible in a newsroom) rewrite the script for clarity.

Or rewrite it to fit your reading style – for example to avoid personally awkward words – and if they go all MC Hammer on you and say “can’t touch this”, then work with it.

Through these around-5-minute episodes, you can build your confidence and competence with advice on breathing and reading, inflection and projection, the roles played by better scripting and better sitting, mic techniques and voice care tips... with exercises and anecdotes from a career spent in TV and radio studios. If you're wondering about how to start a podcast, or have had one for a while - download every episode!

And as themes develop over the weeks (that is, they are not random topics day-by-day), this is a free, course to help you GET A BETTER BROADCAST, PODCAST AND VIDEO VOICE.

Look out for more details of the book during 2021.

Contacts: https://linktr.ee/Peter_Stewart

Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

The podcast title refers to those who may wish to change their speaking voice in some way. It is not a suggestion that anyone should, or be pressured into needing to. We love accents and dialects, and are well aware that how we speak changes over time. The key is: is your voice successfully communicating your message, so it is being understood (and potentially being acted upon) by your target audience?

This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo