Years ago, as our kids waited for the school bus, a car careened up onto the sidewalk forcing us to flee up the grass hill to safety. We often witnessed cars come to a pause at the stop sign, then continue into the intersection not knowing the vertical street was (is!) a straightaway. The intersection has an elementary school, a city school bus stop for grades pre-K through high school, and a city bus stop. Our then seven year-old daughter wrote to City Council requesting a 4-way stop. A traffic study found there were not enough accidents to call for the change (don’t get me started). So, we painted a mandala to slow down the traffic through the intersection. We were proactive. Speakers, too, need to be proactive—we can’t assume event coordinators or venues will have all details covered … Read on.

Sometimes we have a long, complicated and precise speech, are reading from a book or long quote, or are an on-air journalist or voice-over artist, and want to find a way to make this reading sound vital and extemporaneous. In these cases, I use a “Reader’s Copy” like the one pictured in this photo and the “Taking it off the page” technique illustrated in this video. Otherwise, reading from a text can sound read, sound memorized, because it has the even tempo, lulling us to sleep, rather than waking us up to listen. This is why I prefer talks that are deeply “known” vs. talks that are memorized. Conversational speech has a variety of stops and starts, ups and downs, fast and slow, loud and soft. When we must read or memorize, we work to bring that variety into the delivery.

READER’S COPY

This photo is an example of a Reader’s Copy. I made up all of the symbols because they are clear to me. There are no rules, just use what is clear to you. You can use any way of formatting the text as long as it works for you. As you can see in the photo, generally, I use all caps, bold, italics, parentheses, and mark breaths, pauses, and transitions with backslashes or lines.

Here is what I use for clarity:

//=PAUSE/BREATHE for Transitions, BOLD=EMPHASIZE, hit…Read on.