1. Listen to your outgoing phone messages for a few days. How are your vocal habits and voice quality? These are habits you can practice every day.
2. For better projection, open your mouth wider, so that you can articulate each word clearly. This helps with both volume and enunciation.
3. To reduce vocal stress, sip lukewarm liquid. Don’t clear your voice repeatedly, or you will make matters worse. Remember that strain in your voice is almost always more obvious to you than it is to your audience.
4. To sound more confident, avoid sentences that end with an upward note at the end, making them sound like questions. Instead, end each sentence (or phrase) with a downward emphasis.
5. Too many ums? Slow down slightly. Become more at ease with a pause. Rehearse your content out loud, not just in your head.
6. Avoid common qualifier words like “hopefully, maybe, a little, just…” which weaken your message. Be direct and forceful in your wording.
7. Breathe before you begin speaking. You’ll have enough breath to end each sentence with full voice; and you won’t trail off at the end of a sentence.
8. Try to keep from thinking ahead too much – if you lose your train of thought, you will end up with more fillers.
9. Use a voice recorder or listen to your voice messages to check your enunciation, volume and clarity.
10. For greater vocal interest and inflection, emphasize 2-3 key words in each sentence. Experiment with which words to emphasize, making sure you don’t change the meaning of the sentence.
Sections of this topic
10 Quick Tips for Better Voice Habits
Sections of this topic
All About Advertising and Promotions
All About Advertising and Promotions © Copyright Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Before you learn more about advertising, you should get a basic impression of what advertising is. See What’s “Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales?”. Advertising is specifically part of the “outbound” marketing activities, or activities geared to communicate …
Basic Definitions: Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations, Publicity, and Sales
Basic Definitions: Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales Entered by Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD Also consider Related Library Topics It’s easy to become confused about these terms: advertising, marketing, promotion, public relations and publicity, and sales. The terms are often used interchangeably. However, they refer to different — but similar activities. Some …
Marketing Committees and Public Relations Committees
Marketing Committees © Copyright Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Vast majority of content in this topic applies to for-profits and nonprofits. This book also covers this topic. Marketing Committees Committees The purpose of the Board Marketing Committee is to ensure ongoing, high-quality marketing. “Marketing” is the set of activities to cultivate useful relationships …
Public Relations, Media Relations and Reputation Management
Public Relations, Media Relations and Reputation Management © Copyright Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Public relations activities aim to cultivate a strong, positive image of the organization among its stakeholders. Similar to effective advertising and promotions, effective public relations often depends on designing and implementing a well-designed public relations plan. The plan often …
Becoming A Technical Writer-Communicator Review
I am seeing there is still a great interest in people wanting to become Technical Writers. For that reason, I am going to review some steps to become one. If you are currently employed: • write about your job and what the requirements are for that position. • write about all your daily tasks and …
Creating A Knowledge Community
A Technical Writer needs to create a Knowledge Community. How and why we need a Knowledge Community you ask? Being a Technical Writer can be difficult when trying to obtain knowledge. Whom do you consider for contacting, where do you look. How do you decide if you should gather knowledge verbally face-to-face or in meetings, …
Tips for Handling Technical Writer Stress
Everyone gets stressed out at work no matter what your job function. As a Technical Writer, you too will probably have situations at one time or other where you get stressed out as well. In order to avoid communicating less or ineffectively, take a break or slow down for a while. Here are a few …
Likeminded Communication
Trying to communicate technical information to various cultures is not as simple as others may think. For a technical communicator, it requires more than just training, because being moderately acquainted with cultural differences is just not enough. Likeminded A previous post that I had written on communicating globally, noted that ‘Individuals need to understand the …
A Technical Writer Is Different From Other Writers
‘Why?’ A Technical Writer possesses a lot of technical knowledge such as in software and data skills, including investigating, researching and being a middleman between the target audience, management, technical personnel (I.e., programmers, engineers), and others. Being a Technical Writer means being able to gather, communicate, and translate essential and necessary technical information between different …
Involve and Engage Your Audience 20 Ways
Not long ago I worked with an energetic, creative group who, while focusing on presentation skills, wondered how to best engage their audiences. I asked them what engagement strategies they appreciated when they were in the audience. They had plenty of ideas about engagement techniques that I think any speaker could benefit from. These are …
Tips On Documenting Processes
Numerous types of processes (i.e., business processes) exist in many organizations. Processes specifically involve defining and outlining a sequence of events or systematic movements that are to be followed. These processes need to be documented and identified by the Technical Writer. Benefits Documenting processes • ensures that everyone understands the overall picture of what the …
Communicating Technical Writing Review
It is always good to do a review as some of us might have forgotten the essentials of how to create a document full of technical information for your audience. Another acronym for technical writing could be informational writing or knowledge writing or even instructional writing. Let us start at the beginning. Basics • Build …
Communicating Via Visual Designs
We don’t always realize it, but sometimes we are being told what to do visually. Take these as examples: • A zebra crosswalk on the road – we know to walk within the zebra crossing. • A sign of a bicycle – we know the lane is a bicycle path. • A light switch- we …
Special Tips for Laptop Presentations
If you are presenting, odds are you are using your laptop either to walk the listeners through content in a small group, or projected on a screen to a larger group, or online when speaking with a virtual group. It’s just how we present these days. But so many people stumble over the technology, which …
Storytelling For Communication
Story telling is useful, effective, and important when it comes to communication. You do not have to listen to complicated boring lectures nor read tons of manuals to understand the content. For example, how do you show the growth of a company? How do you show what happened during its history? Visual storytelling can help. …