0303 – 10 – Grammar Glue

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - October 29, 2021 23:01 - 6 minutes - 3.82 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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Previous Episode: 0302 – 9 – By Super-Stressing One Insignificant Word, You Downplay The Sense Of The Sentence

Next Episode: 0304 – Grammar Glue Part 2

2021.10.30 – 0303 – 10 – Grammar Glue

Consider a dodgy phone connection and you can only hear some of what a friend is saying. You get the gist of the content from the meaningful words in the sentence: the words which actually are full of meaning, give detail and context and move the story along.

Some words in a sentence don’t add much information, they are there to give it structure and hold the important words together. They act as grammar ‘glue’.

You can usually dampen down these delete-able words as by definition they are usually unimportant. Let’s go through some of them.

and – Some people see this word and highlight it every time. Go back and look at that sentence again and colour the word “and” and you’ll realise how daft this is. Drawing attention to ‘and’ gives the impression that each of the two words or phrases either side may be mutually exclusive, or the listener should presume that they usually are.

“After the crash, police swept the road and opened it to traffic” – highlighting “and” gives the impression that the officers may usually do one of these jobs or the other, but not usually both.

On occasion you do want to draw attention to ‘and’ as we see from our airline example: “You cannot have chicken, fish and pasta” – but does this mean you could have both chicken and fish on the same plate...?

Note that prepositions, words which describe a relationship between one item and another, are coloured very rarely. You do not order breakfast by asking for “egg and bacon, beans on toast and a cup of tea” but some readers use exactly that intonation.

In this case the intonation goes hand-in-hand with the pronunciation of that three-letter word “and”:

· The uncoloured, throwaway version is said ‘nd’ or ‘n’ – “Do you want bread n butter with your fish n chips?”

· The coloured pronunciation rhymes with ‘sand’ – “My friend is just having soup n a roll but I’m having soup n a roll and fish and chips”.

It’s the same with other words where colouring them changes how you say them: “Hey I said you could have a chip, not all of them” (where “a” is said “ay”) vs. “He went for a walk” (with “a” said like a short “er”), and it’s similar with the word “an”.

“The” can be said “thee” when you draw attention to it (“The presidents of the state’s Rotary Clubs met thee President at the White House today”) and also perhaps uniquely changes how you say it depending on whether the word that follows it is a vowel or consonant.

“The army and the navy are combining in a show of strength this weekend…”

Didn’t you automatically say “thee army” and “thuh navy”…?

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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