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Podcasting your way to better word choices
June 9th, 2008I thought I’d try my hand at podcasting. I spent all of $10 dollars at Target on a PC microphone, downloaded Audacity, and was on my way. One thing I wished I’d done in my first few weeks of blogging was experiment more with the tools before I started to generate real content. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again, but learned something about myself that I didn’t expect to when I started.
To conduct my testing, I needed a subject. Fortunately, I live with an energetic Kindergartener who always has something to talk about so I interviewed her for about 20 minutes. That gave me a long enough audio sample to play around with in the editing software. The more I listened to what we recorded, the more appalled I became at my word choices and diction. Almost every time I changed subjects, I started the sentence with the word “now”.
“Now, I understand you just had a dance recital. How did that go?”
“Now, tell me more about graduation.”
“Now, what are the names of all the kids in your class?”
To nearly ever answer she gave, I said, “OK” and I noticed that I dropped g’s from every “ing” word I spoke. Readin’, writin’, dancin’.
I sounded like an idiot.
I can only assume I sound like that on the myriad of conference calls I’m on every week and sound like an idiot there too. Since this embarrassing experience, I find myself paying a lot more attention to how I word things and check my pronunciation constantly. It’s really helped my oral communication and I completely fell into it by accident.
That’s to say you have to attempt a full podcast, but do yourself a favor and record your own voice during a friendly conversation so you can find places to improve.
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June 15th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Hi Pete
my advice to you is just to be careful with that, cause when you too accurate in your pronuncing than instead of being an idiot, your freinds to the conversation feel like you think them to idiots and that why you talk like a kindergarden teacher.
of course like you said in the past when you speak with an international team group’ there is no such a thing ‘too accurate pronuncing’.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Good point Rotem. You can go too far the other way, can’t you? I didn’t consider that but you are absolutely right. There’s a middle ground there somewhere.
—Pete