Energetic Diction

One day, as I was returning from a trip, I struck up a conversation with the woman beside me on the shuttle bus into Toronto. Suddenly she asked, “Are you in the theatre?” I replied, “Why, yes! How did you know?” She replied, “Because your diction is so good.”

The topic of clear diction could be the subject of an entire book! As with every aspect of public speaking, ensuring that your audience can understand you requires conscious attention. It doesn’t just happen without any effort on the part of the speaker. Too often, we don’t give the matter any thought at all. Because we know what we are saying, and because we have always talked the way we do, it never occurs to us that there may be room (and need!) for improvement.

Your output of energy determines your clarity of speech. If you haven’t had singing or elocution training, it’s hard to understand how much energy good diction requires. Improving your diction without another person’s help is difficult, because you don’t hear yourself as others do. It takes an outside pair of ears to give us objective feedback.

The main culprits in poor diction are lazy consonants and slurred syllables. You must use your tools of articulation – your jaw, lips and tongue –energetically to create clear speech. I tell my students that good diction is an athletic event – you’re just using smaller muscles than you use to play soccer.

Have you ever listened to someone who barely moved their jaw when they spoke? Did you notice that all the vowels came out sounding almost the same? The vowels carry the tone of the voice. Each one has its own unique sound and requires a different shape of the mouth. Your mouth can’t create that shape unless you give it enough room to do so. And the only way you can give it enough room is to allow your lower jaw to flop away from your upper jaw. You may be too young to remember the early days of television, but I remember the marionette “Howdy Doody”. His jaw flopped open with every syllable. If Sesame Street is more your era, think of how Kermit the Frog moved his mouth. In a less exaggerated way, that’s exactly what humans need to do.

Consonants are articulated with the tongue and the lips. If the tongue is allowed to lie softly in the mouth, consonants will not be clear. It needs to move with energy and to come into firm contact with the roof of the mouth or the teeth. Experiment with the sound of the letters “T” and “D”. The tip of the tongue pushes firmly against the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth and then pulls away abruptly. The hard sound of the letter “G” is similar, except that it is formed by the back of the tongue coming in contact with the soft palate. The muscle of the tongue should push firmly against its point of contact, instead of being allowed to barely touch.

There are no muscles in the pink part of your lips, but all around your mouth is a band of strong, versatile muscles that we call the lip muscles. The lips are responsible for consonants like “B” and “P”. Bring the lips together firmly, as if you were spitting watermelon seeds. (Well, watermelons used to have seeds!) For the letters “F” and “V”, the lower lip needs to come into direct contact with the underside of the upper front teeth for those letters to be clear. It’s not enough to bring the lower lip somewhere in the general vicinity.

You get the idea. The lips and tongue are muscles. They need to be engaged and active. They need to be used with energy.

Slurred syllables make it almost impossible to discern what a speaker is saying. “Lays ‘n Jellmn” is not an acceptable substitute for “Ladies and Gentlemen”.  The vowels carry the tone of the voice, but the consonants distinguish one syllable from another, and without that clear distinction, who knows what is being said? Most people could exaggerate their diction many times over before it got to the point of being almost clear enough. Try thinking of words as something delicious, something to be savoured in your mouth. It might help you to treat words with more care as you speak them.

Why make your listeners work to understand you? It is the speaker’s job to do the work of speaking clearly and distinctly. As with everything, clarity of diction relates to energy. Here the relationship is two-fold. If you care enough about your listeners’ experience (loving energy for your audience) you will be willing to use enough physical energy to make your words clear.

Heather Stubbs

www.skilltime.ca