By Olga Smith
26 July 2020
In many professions and in social life, the way we speak often defines our success. In this blog post, I will first outline the main features of a boring way of speaking. Secondly, I will give you practical tasks from our elocution lessons to turn your speech into an interesting one.
What makes us sound boring then? Below, I would like to layout 7 reasons that make one sound boring:
When we speak too slowly
When we have poor articulation
When we use a lot of empty words, words fillers and parasite words and predictable cliches
When we speak monotonously, without emotions and feelings
When we are not connected to our listeners on an intellectual and emotional level
When we do not get to the point and, to coin a phrase, go in circles without really saying much
When we speak on one level of pitch and never move the voice up and down
How do we change that? How can we speak so that people listen to us with interest and attention? An obvious answer is taking elocution lessons. Below are the tips from our elocution lessons.
Stress important words and messages. I recommend that you sentence stress and use schwa to “throw away” unimportant words such as auxiliary verbs, articles and some prepositions like “for, from, to, of”.
Make sure you have crisp consonants. Practise muscular, rhythmic and articulation exercises with the app Get Rid of your Accent. Read our blog about articulation.
Record your speech for 5-10 minutes and check that you do not use a lot of words and phrases that do not carry important meaning; those are parasites words and cliche phrases. For example, my parasite word is “basically”, my cliche phrase is “do you see what I mean”. I repeat them like a parrot thus making myself sound a bit boring. I have decided to start collecting, creating and using metaphors instead.
Avoid speaking monotonously, learn how to modulate your voice using the 4Ps, power, pace, pitch, pause with our app.
Take into account your listeners, do a bit of research about them and practise 3D listening, Try to connect to their level. NLP will give you more techniques about how to do that.
When you speak, stress your key messages, practise speaking in a concise way.
Read our blog about the 5 top benefits of elocution lessons to get more insights. More on www.batcsglobal.com