0502 – 19 - Unlock the Full Stops

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

2022.05.17 – 0502 – 19 - Unlock the Full Stops

19 - Unlock the Full Stops

Free the periods and commas to recreate a natural verbal fluidity.

Don't pause where the full stop/period is. Instead, ignore them – and break the flow of the words where it feels more natural to. And that’s not necessarily at the end of a grammatical chunk.

And we saw before, sentences are an artificial way to marshal the written word. Conversationally we don’t use them. So you need to break away from the normal structure of sentences when wanting to read ‘naturally’, to give the impression that the words are just occurring to you, that you are delivering spontaneous thoughts. That you are thinking in the moment, not ‘reading’ a pre-prepared script.

To help in this artifice, think of how you sound when talking with friends and replicate that style. Either re-mark your script, or adlib it live, so that punctuation is moved or even removed.

· Don’t stop at the full stop – OK you can’t always do this but sometimes you can. After all you don’t want to pause at every single one as that’s not how we speak naturally. You need to find a rhythm and a flow in the story or the script, where a desire for understanding trumps punctuation.

· Merge sentences together.

Ask yourself: will the punctuation help you or the listener understand the information – or is it or getting in the way of a connected delivery?

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