0166 - Problematic Pronunciations

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - June 14, 2021 23:01 - 4 minutes - 2.74 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Arts Business voiceover your speaking voice voice over training voiceover hour voiceover social Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: 0165 – Initially Speaking

Next Episode: 0167 – Problematic Punctuations

2021.06.15-0166 – Problematic Pronunciations

Pronunciations

Check any word of phrase you are not familiar with, or with which you just know you will trip up over:

· The engineering company Thales is actually pronounced ‘tar-les’ and not ‘thayles’

· The word bombardier is ‘bom-ber-DEER’, but when it refers to the French locomotive company it is ‘bom-BARDY-AY’

· A colleague once referred to the city of Middlesbrough as ‘middles-BRUFF’ rather than ‘middles-BURRA’.

It may be that you can omit the word or name (at least until you have checked it out), if it doesn’t alter the sense of the story:

“The Prime Minister’s aide, Gugulethu Mseleku, said that…” simply becomes “the Prime Minister’s aide said that…”

We all have words that we personally find undue difficulty in getting right. My bêtes noires include:

· “rural” (those two r-sounds so close together)

· the worry of starting to say “country” and realising it should be “county” and ending up with the rude hybrid.

So if you have similar script-traps, watch out for them, change them if you can, and if you can’t, highlight them in a script so there’s extra concentration with their pronunciation.

It is often best if you can, to put any potentially awkward word at the start of a sentence rather than the end. Doing this gives you a beat’s pause to mentally rehearse it: a stumble at the end of the sentence may disrupt your flow more obviously.

If in doubt, and the word cannot be avoided, say it with conviction – and then go and check what it should have been!

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