General Performance Hints
- Excerpts
In the podcasting assignment, you will be asked to excerpt one of these pieces. Focus on the part(s) that is most relevant to your project. Pare it down. Don’t be afraid to make cuts or even do a few shorter excerpts that you can put throughout the project. If you’re not sure, discuss it with your classmates or your instructor.
- Figure out how you want to recite this.
Read the piece. Figure out what words or phrases are important to you so you can emphasize them. For several of these pieces, like the Declaration of Independence or the Virginia Plan, use a more formal voice, as if you were doing a documentary. For other pieces, like “Give me Liberty or Give me Death”, your voice should express the emotion of the speech
- A script! Or at least an outline!
This isn’t the kind of podcast where people speak extemporaneously. You need at least an outline, but a script is a good idea. .
- Practice!
The first time normally isn’t very good. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve read a piece, reciting it is a different thing. When you’re recording, figure that you’ll have to do multiple takes.
- Speak at a normal rate. There aren’t prizes for fastest podcast.
When we’re nervous, we tend to speak faster. It’s natural. But that gets in your way here. We tend to run our words together when we speak quickly, making ourselves harder to understand.
- Speak at a normal volume
Whispering is not your friend here. Your voice needs to be loud and clear enough that your audience can hear it.
- If you stumble, keep going.
If you’re recording yourself, finish the recording then listen. If it’s not bad, you can turn it in if you like, Or you can delete it and try again. Another option is to repeat the phrase you stumbled over and just edit out the bad take. At some point, you’ll probably record something about ten times, never getting it quite right, then you’ll just give up and go “This is the best one. I’m done.” That’s natural.
- Remember to hit the final consonant sounds.
In normal conversation, many people tend to drop the final consonant in words, especially if that consonant is /t,d,s,z/. This is more formal speech, so you need to pronounce them. As an example, the man’s name is Robert Frost, not Robber Fros.
- Your tone of voice matters.
You shouldn’t sound bored or over it. You shouldn’t sound like a robot. You should try to sound like a narrator for a documentary.
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