A nondescript, gray-haired professor worked at one university: he wore thick glasses and terribly old-fashioned suits. It is very easy to miss such a person in a crowd.
But as soon as he entered the classroom and began to speak, a miracle of transformation took place: the eyes of the entire audience were riveted on the professor, and even the lazy people in the last rows listened to his every word.
From his lips flowed such competent, clear speech, such intelligent and deep thoughts that from an old man he turned into a stately, representative speaker. Nobody noticed his thick glasses, bald head and threadbare suit anymore. Isn't it amazing?
Agree: clear, consistent and convincing presentation of your thoughts is a real art. And in order for your words to be listened to in the same way as that professor, you need to give a speech and learn to speak competently. This will be useful to you in any area of life.
Thanks to these skills, you can be the life of the party, easily convince a potential partner to sign a contract with you, speak effectively in front of an audience and achieve any goals you set.
Diction training
You need to start your workout with proper breathing. If you breathe incorrectly, this can lead to a break in your voice, prolonged pauses, and a distortion of the meaning of the phrase. Therefore, during public speaking, speakers do not use ordinary breathing, but speech breathing. Normal breathing may simply not be enough, so it is important to learn how to use air correctly and restore it in time. In this case, use diaphragm breathing. It is developed through a whole system of breathing training, but it requires persistence and a lot of patience.
Next, work begins directly on correct pronunciation - diction. To do this you need to perform simple steps:
- Record your reading of any text on a voice recorder.
- Listen to the resulting recording.
- Let others listen to it.
- Compare your opinion and someone else's.
- Highlight the main disadvantages.
The most common pronunciation errors are:
- incorrect pronunciation of vowel sounds in a weak position (without stress);
- “eating” individual consonant sounds;
- loss of vowel sounds;
- incorrect combination of consonant sounds when they are connected;
- unclear pronunciation of hissing and whistling sounds;
- incorrect pronunciation of soft sounds, etc.
It is advisable to correct diction with the help of specialists. Now there are many organizations where speech therapists work. Of course, the classes are mainly designed for children, but you can take private lessons to quickly achieve the desired effect.
Reading and reading again
An effective way to develop speech in adults and children is reading. You don't need to read everything. Classic literature or special books on speech development are perfect.
We can recommend such works as “The Living and the Dead Word” by Nora Gal, “From Adam’s Apple to the Apple of Discord” by Vadim Khrapp and “Alive as Life” by Korney Chukovsky.
There is a lot of worthy literature on the Internet, reading which will help you improve your speech and expand your vocabulary.
Retelling what you read can increase efficiency. Just ask someone to monitor how correctly and consistently you present the text.
As you read, you will come across interesting quotes. We recommend writing down the ones you especially like in a notebook so that you can re-read them and remember them from time to time.
In addition to books, social networks are also teeming with clever phrases and excerpts from books. It doesn’t matter where the quotes come from, it’s much more important to remember them.
In the right situation, your brain will tell you who is worth quoting. Such a sudden coloration of speech can turn your words into a real masterpiece of oratory.
Advice for those who will practice diction on their own
All classes should begin with exercises to relax the muscles responsible for correct articulation. It is better to follow a certain sequence of exercises. You need to start the exercises with the simplest ones, gradually moving on to more complex ones. You need to exercise every day. Proceed to the next exercise only after the previous one has been fully mastered. Every day you need to set new goals and objectives. The achieved results need to be maintained from time to time by repeating the basic exercises.
Working on the content and technique of your speech
One of the common speech mistakes is speaking too quickly. When a person is in a hurry, as they say, chattering, it is difficult to perceive him. You need to learn to control the pace of your speech. To begin with, you can pronounce at a very slow pace some speech material that does not require special understanding. This could be a sequence of numbers, for example, up to one hundred, names of months, cities or countries, a list of male or female names.
It is better to write down this sequence so that you can pronounce the words in forward and reverse order. Over time, having memorized this sequence, it is better to reproduce it from memory, simultaneously training your memory. Then you need to move on to repeating the text by ear. Moreover, it should be recorded at a fast pace, but it will need to be repeated at a slow pace.
How to “put” a voice
Of course, the term “voice production” applies more to musicians, actors and other creative professions. It means that you need to train the strength of your voice, its range and timbre. The power of your voice can be trained by loudly and clearly pronouncing texts of various types: poems, fables, odes, prose poems.
The range can be expanded if you pronounce a variety of text exercises in the highest or lowest tones. In this case, the voice should ideally become higher or lower, depending on the final goal. The timbre of the voice depends on overtones, that is, on an additional tone that sounds like a kind of echo. An overtone appears when sound is reflected from the wall of a natural resonator (your own skull, chest cavity, larynx, etc.).
Speech development
Unfortunately, modern people are increasingly becoming tongue-tied, unable to express thoughts correctly, and confused about the meanings of words. There are many reasons for this.
Firstly, they read little now, as they spend more time in front of a computer monitor or TV screen.
Secondly, too few samples of literate speech are heard. It’s no secret that even from a TV screen you rarely hear examples of correct and beautiful speech. There is no need to talk about radio stations at all: DJs communicate with radio listeners in the same way as they are used to communicating with friends - peppering their speech with slang words and expressions.
Thirdly, they rarely watch theatrical productions. After all, the theater requires a special style of clothing, you need to behave culturally, the most important thing is to understand the content of individual mise-en-scenes, the complexity of the characters’ characters. All this requires extra effort from people, so it’s much easier to go to the movies, eat popcorn and laugh.
However, if you are firmly convinced that your speech is characterized by a poor vocabulary, an abundance of speech errors and incorrect sentence construction, and you intend to learn how to command the attention of the audience, then you simply urgently need to start working on your own speech.
How to make your speech beautiful
First of all, in your quest to learn how to speak correctly, you need a responsible approach and a clearly developed strategy. It will also be useful for you to follow several rules in the process of improving your speech:
- Eliminate parasitic words from circulation.
- Read fiction.
- Constantly enrich your speech with new words.
- Deal with diction or pronunciation defects.
- Listen to beautiful and correct speech.
- Retell what you read or heard.
- Avoid tautologies. Highlight the main thing.
- Develop memory
- Dealing with public fear
These tips seem simple, but only constant adherence to them will lead to the desired result. You can deliver a speech without outside help, all you need is self-control and discipline.
Learning to speak beautifully
So, here are tips that will help you learn to master beautiful and competent speech.
Build sentences correctly
Illiterate and monotonous speech is primarily revealed by incorrectly constructed sentences. When a person painfully selects words to continue the thought he has begun, makes long pauses, and as a result receives a “clumsy” thought, this indicates that he does not have the technique of correctly constructing sentences.
To learn how to structure correctly, you need to start with written exercises, writing down interesting thoughts, observations, and aphorisms in a separate notebook. In the future, immediately before the speech, you need to compose the text in advance on paper, retelling it according to a ready-made plan, repeating individual expressions.
You can generally keep a diary (this is fashionable, judging by TV series like “The Diary of Doctor Zaitseva” and similar ones), recording your impressions of the day, some of your observations, reasoning. All this contributes to the development of speech in general, and the correct construction of sentences in particular.
Increase your vocabulary
Poverty of speech reveals a meager vocabulary. If a person expresses his assessments, judgments, comments in the same words, this indicates that it is difficult for him to express his thoughts due to lack of knowledge. Therefore, such speech makes a repulsive impression, and the person himself will not have authority, especially among those who are fluent in speech.
Agree, in our time, say, a tongue-tied school principal is nonsense. He simply will not be able to speak in front of teachers, which means he will not be able to gain authority either among his colleagues or among the students of his own school. After all, even illiterate students understand that teachers, and even more so the director, must be literate in every sense of the word.
How to diversify your speech? Of course, first of all, work with an explanatory dictionary. Having heard a word that is new to you, you need to find its meaning in the dictionary, write it down and remember it. Moreover, you need to remember a word only in context, that is, in a sentence. Used without context, a word may be incomprehensible or perceived with a distorted meaning.
It’s a good idea to at least solve crosswords or scanword puzzles, because they also give the meanings of words, sometimes in an allegorical or ironic sense, which helps to learn to understand the polysemy of a word. It is also important to read articles in various magazines - not just glossy ones.
For example, reading economic news will help you understand the financial and legal fields and will significantly enrich your speech with terms from these areas. If you are interested in medicine, even by watching programs like “Live Healthy” and similar ones, you can understand many medical concepts, ranging from a basic injection to highly specialized terms.
By reading articles on psychology, you can expand your vocabulary with many fairly modern concepts, because now almost everyone is either their own psychologist or their own doctor. Ideally, it is better to expand your social circle. After all, by maintaining relationships with lawyers, specialists in the field of IT technologies, doctors, teachers, etc., you will, wittingly or unwittingly, hear words that are new to you, gradually starting to understand their meaning, and then introducing them into your own speech.
Learn to highlight the main thing
Attention to detail is good for observation. But during speeches, especially public ones, excessive detail can lead to weakening interest and boredom. Therefore, it is important to learn how to compress any information. Using computer programs, compressing a volume of information is quite simple. How to do this with text?
Making a plan plays a huge role. A plan allows you to define the sequence, focus attention on what is important, and also emphasize the most important details. Three main techniques are used to compress text: exclusion, generalization and replacement. Mastering these techniques will help you create a real masterpiece of eloquence from any lengthy and uninteresting text.
Get rid of parasitic words
There is nothing more painful than public speech peppered with words like “like”, “here”, “so to speak”, “as if” and many others. It is no coincidence that they are called parasitic words, because they are implanted into speech, killing its beauty and sound. Therefore, this requires very painstaking work to cleanse your speech of “speech impurities.” First you need to record your speech in public using a voice recorder. Next, you need to listen to this speech, noting those words that clog it. Ask your friends to constantly notice such words when communicating with them, correcting you each time.
You need to learn to control the pace of speech so that you have time to stop before you blurt out something like that. Let it be better to have a short pause than “booing” and “backing”. This requires self-discipline and constant self-control from a person, but the result is certainly worth such sacrifices.
Expand your speaking practice
Now, in the age of testing and copying ready-made homework assignments, it is rarely possible to give a monologue speech. This is why former schoolchildren and students then come to work tongue-tied. Therefore, if you set yourself the goal of learning to speak correctly, it is important to use all opportunities for public speaking already at school.
Oral answers in class, speeches at various scientific and practical conferences, speeches in front of classmates, on stage - all this will not only help you become self-confident, but will also force you to speak coherently, competently, and convincingly.
Of course, reading classic fiction or popular science literature will also help, because you can always give examples from books or modern reality. And nothing makes a speech more convincing than bringing a large number of arguments.
Use gestures that will make you feel more comfortable when in front of an audience, and the right associations will be evoked by listeners. If at first you speak, looking at your notes, then frequent and lengthy speeches will soon help you feel confident even during direct communication with the audience or a certain circle of people.
Where does beautiful speech come from?
A child’s beautiful speech is the merit of his parents. It is advisable to develop conversational skills from childhood. This is facilitated by visiting a theater studio or poetry club, as well as constantly reading and learning poetry.
The childhood of the modern generation is inextricably linked with computers, which is why there is practically no time left for books. This is a very important shortcoming of many parents, because in the question of how to learn to speak beautifully, reading is indispensable.
Language and literature lessons at school make a significant contribution to the development of children's speech. If school teachers do not produce the desired results, parents must take matters into their own hands.
It is worth considering individual lessons with your child, or enrolling him in private lessons with another teacher who will help him develop the art of speaking freely on any topic.
But what if your parents missed out on the development of beautiful speech as a child? Don't get upset and think that you have no chance of learning to speak clearly. You can still catch up, it’s never too late to improve!
