Clarity Of Speech - Clarity Of Thought: How To Improve Your Speech

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

If people around you already understand what you are saying, do you need to think once more about how you speak? Especially if you have nothing to do with professional communication or public speaking? Ksenia Chernova, a speech technique trainer, is sure that yes: in her opinion, beautiful sound and clear speech are as basic a necessity as, for example, a neat appearance. We talked with Ksenia and found out why and how you can independently develop your speech skills

Usually people rarely have the questions "Why dress nicely?" or "Why walk with a washed head and straight teeth?" (we, of course, are talking about a certain category of people who care about how they look and what impression they make). It's the same story with the voice.

Voice - this is part of our personality, part of our characteristic, by which people read information about who we are. If we are beautiful visually, but we open our mouths and begin to creak, mumble, indistinctly chew words, speak quietly, uncertainly, with defects - the world around us literally collapses. They do not understand, they have a kind of cognitive dissonance between what they see and what they hear. And if we want to create the right impression of a professional, self-confident person who knows what he wants, we must speak no worse than a minimally trained TV presenter. And it's not difficult.

Voice is a very flexible and amenable structure that can change in the same way as our body can change

But if in the case of the body this is a long process, at least 3–6 months, then you can train your voice rather quickly. Moreover, you can see some first, but significant changes, say, in 16 hours of classes (these are two days of full-fledged education and training), and the rest is already a matter of regularity.

Having received such a voice that he likes himself, a person begins to feel completely different - to feel real, more confident, having control over the situation. Voice is training. Breathing, sounding, articulation training. And also - regular conscious control in the course of a conversation: it is important at least to think about how I breathe, where I sound, whether I have lost my resonator, on which it is convenient for me to speak, whether my mouth opens, whether my tongue works well …

All these points are a matter of discipline, as in any business that we want to do well. Like any habit, like any restructuring in the body, mind, body, voice and speech training - everything takes time. For someone it is two weeks, for someone - a month, and for someone seven days is enough. It is impossible to predict when exactly speech training will come into life as a permanent skill, but if you are systematic enough, it will definitely happen and will hardly take more than a month. My task in the training process is to make people enjoy the way they speak and how they sound. The correct sound usually comes from a well-stretched and relaxed body, this is the result of proper muscle tuning, when the body does not get tired of speaking, but enjoys the fact that it sounds full.

What is speech technique? By and large, this is the sum of correct breathing, sounding in the right places, correct opening of the mouth and the work of the articulatory apparatus, and, most importantly, filling this whole form with content - its nature, sincerity, emotions and energy. This is what people react to, because the main thing is when, in addition to having a beautiful sound of a voice, we also know how to convey to them everything that we have.

What can you do yourself to improve your speech?

High-quality speech training is a process that needs to be supervised by a specialist. Nevertheless, there are basic, initial steps that everyone can take on their own to see some first changes and, perhaps, think about how to subsequently turn to professional training.

Breathing and warm-up

The base of good speech is correct breathing, so watch how you breathe next time you wake up. Usually, when a person is relaxed, when he has not yet jumped out of bed and ran to do business, the muscles that we need work for him. So, try to feel them - what muscles work for you when you lie in a relaxed state? Do you have any kind of clamps in your back? What are you breathing? I personally have not yet met people who, in a relaxed lying position, would breathe with something other than their stomach - that is, the way you need to breathe. When we breathe relaxed, groan, cough, laugh, we have natural mechanisms at work - we do all this with the abdominal muscles.

Many people who teach speech try to give their students vocal breathing, which is not necessary, because speech and vocal are different things. Yes, they have the same principle, but there are several nuances that are important for sound reproduction. The vocal voice differs from the spoken voice at least in that it is more processed. If we all spoke with a vocal voice, we would sound like a cartoon opera singer. In order for us to have the pleasure of talking, so that the voice seems to pour out of our body by itself, we need to take into account the techniques of breathing with the stomach.

Right in the morning, lying in bed, watching how your stomach breathes, when you are relaxed, breathe in and out on "fuuu" with slightly closed lips. Pay attention that at this moment your chest does not move. After several "fuuu" we inhale and exhale on "c", as if squeezing the air out of ourselves with the abdominal muscles, all other muscles should be relaxed. Imagine that in the lower abdomen you have, as it were, a reservoir of air (the air that we exhale is our potential sound), and now you exhale all this air from the reservoir under pressure into your front teeth. Not in the top of the head, not somewhere in the back of the head, but in the front teeth and the sound "s". And so 6-8 times, after which you need to get up and try to do the same exercise, but already standing.

After you understand that you are breathing correctly and you have no obstacles between the stomach and the front teeth, we try along the same trajectory, without changing anything in the muscles, exhale at the sound "m" so that the teeth, upper lip, and wings of the nose rattle … This is called a resonator - there are four of them, but since we train only basic things on our own, with this exercise we knead the main one. The next step is to combine mooing with the warm-up of the cervical and shoulder sections of the body, that is, when you breathe on the "m", do several soft circles with your head in one direction, then in the other, up and down and left and right. Then we switch to the shoulders: we sound into the resonator and make circular movements in one direction on one exhalation, we get air - and in the other direction on the next inhalation. Why do we knead our shoulders and neck? Because if they have some kind of clamps, it also interferes with speaking well. For example, if the shoulders are raised, the voice does not sound even, but rather crushed.

Articulation

After we have stretched the body, neck and shoulders, we train a simple phrase: "Mom, mom, honey to us", still speaking as if from the belly. With this phrase, we learn to combine the correct consonant sound with vowels - you need to learn how to do so that there are no breaks between "m" and "a" - and then, finally, we move on to warm up the articulatory apparatus, do articulatory gymnastics, knead lips, tongue and jaw.

Here are some of the simplest exercises for warm-up lips (you can easily watch their visual performance on the Internet):

- We stretch our lips with a "proboscis" and twist them from side to side. It is important to twist with your lips and not work with your jaw - it is closed and does not help the lips, only the muscles of the face work! We did this 8 times from side to side and relieved the tension, as horses do, a kind of "pfrrr" from the belly to the lips, so that the lips flutter.

- Then we do the same, but now we move our lips up and down, also 8 times and also relieve tension.

- Now we turn on the tongue and in a circular motion on the inside of our mouth we knead the muscles of the cheeks and lips, and the tongue itself is kneaded. This is a hard exercise, the muscles get tired of it, but it is wonderful fatigue. This should be done 5 times in one direction and 5 times in the other, pressing the tongue on the cheeks and lips. We release tension.

- After we have stretched our tongue and lips, we knead the jaw. First, we simply knead the jaw joints near the ears with our fingers, then we open our mouth so that the fingers fall into these parotid cavities, then you can move the jaw from side to side.

- There is one more secret exercise - we take a marker, lipstick, ink, pencil, in general, something oblong, and insert it across the mouth, clamping it with our teeth, checking if the muscles of the face are not tense - they should be relaxed. In this state, we begin to say, for example, the following pure phrase: "On Thursday the fourth, at four and a quarter o'clock, four little black little imp were drawing a drawing in black ink." Your task is to make the words sound as clear as possible even in this uncomfortable position. This will open your jaw, lips and tongue perfectly, and when you pull the marker out of your mouth, you will immediately feel how to speak and sound much easier.

In general, in the case of gymnastics of the articulatory apparatus, there can be no wrong exercises - do any that you find. The only thing: make sure that when you start using your crumpled speech apparatus, your lips are not active and do not "dance" all over your face, it looks ugly, articulation should not irritate your listener. Look carefully at how high-quality TV presenters speak: they do not have excessive articulation, but their jaw opens well on stressed vowels. There is not a single presenter, probably, who speaks with a closed mouth and a closed jaw, but in ordinary life there are a lot of such people.

Diction

Diction can be worked out with high quality in just 3-5 days of classes, if you devote at least 2 minutes of your time to articulation exercises and pure phrases every day. Pure tongue twisters are special phrases and phrases, the same as tongue twisters, but we use them not to speak quickly, but to speak clearly.

An example of a phrase-mongering: "There is a pop on a mop, a cap on a priest, a mop under a booty, and a pop under a cap." Quite often, when people say it for the first time, they "swallow" half of the sounds. Pronounce this phrase, clearly and distinctly pronouncing the endings (you can record yourself on a dictaphone to listen from the sidelines). Next, notice how you pronounce the stressed vowels. They should be slightly longer in sound and more full of sound than other sounds. Stressed vowels are the core of the word, they are responsible for its volume and beauty.

And one more point that should be noted is the fluency of speech: try to speak each phrase as one word, as a single structure. Words should flow into one another, you need to speak in perspective, and not put dots after each word.

Speech training does not belong to the category of processes that must be done in childhood. If in childhood you were not taught to speak correctly, this does not mean that you need to put an end to good speech, because a person has the opportunity to work with a voice at any age.