0285 – 2 - Un-colour Old Information

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - October 11, 2021 23:01 - 6 minutes - 3.77 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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Previous Episode: 0284 – What Are Meaningful Words?

Next Episode: 0286 – What To Do About Synonyms

2021.10.12 – 0285 – 2 - Un-colour Old Information

Unimportant or old information (that is, detail which is already known or presumed to be known), can be ‘thrown away’ in your delivery and does not need to be highlighted. It can stay on your level tone or subdued.

“The crash was between two cars. The blue car hit the red car.” We just saw how you would naturally slightly highlight “crash” and “two cars” in the first sentence but would you colour the word “car” in the second? Go ahead and you will hear how wrong it sounds. That’s because we already know the accident involved cars (rather than trucks, coaches, taxis or motorbikes) – it’s old information. The new detail is the colour of the cars – so that’s what we highlight.

“Mary had a little lamb. The lamb’s name was Larry” - we lifted “Mary”, “lamb” and “Larry” because they are names or new information, but subdue the second reference to the lamb, because that’s old information., but lift its name.

Of course, you might say, that’s not how we would write a sentence – with a repeated word. And you’re right, you’d probably naturally speak by replacing the subsequent use of “car” or “lamb” with a pronoun. “The blue one hit the red one” and “its name was Larry”.

But that doesn’t change the ‘rule’: whether it’s known information through a repeated word, or a substitute for that word, you still don’t highlight its subsequent appearances.[1]

Let’s look at these two sentences again:

“The crash was between two cars. The blue one hit the red one”

“Mary had a little lamb. It was called Larry.”

And actually, you’ll see that even though we replaced the repetitive words with pronouns, we didn’t even need to do that. Much of the content of the second sentences is so throwaway and insignificant, we could have just, as we may have done in a conversation, just not said most of it:

“The crash was between two cars. The blue hit the red.”

“Mary had a little lamb: Larry.”

So old information, such as a repeated noun is not lifted, even if it is a replaced with a pronoun. And many times, the pronouns are so unnecessary anyway, we can remove them from the sentence as well.

[1] Although there may be a few exemptions to this as we will see later.

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