Extemporaneous speaking sounds conversational and natural. This conversational style sounds the way you normally express yourself in a much smaller group than your classroom audience. While you are well prepared, you still sound natural and even spontaneous. No one wants to hear a speech that is so well rehearsed that it sounds fake or robotic. One of the hardest parts of public speaking is rehearsing to the point where it can appear to your audience that the thoughts are magically coming to you while you’re speaking, but in reality you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking through each idea. When you can sound conversational, people pay attention. When we are having a conversation with a friend or small group, we tend to use a vocal variety or changes in our tone, pitch, volume, and other vocal aspects. Vocal variety has to do with changes in our vocals. No one wants to hear the same volume, pitch, rate, or use of pauses over and over again in a speech. Your audience should never be able to detect that you’re about to slow down or your voice is going to get deeper because you’re making an important point. When you think about how you sound in a normal conversation, your use of volume, pitch, rate, and pauses are all done spontaneously. If you try to over rehearse your vocals, your speech will end up sounding artificial. Vocal variety should flow naturally from your wish to speak with expression. In that way, it will animate your speech and invite your listeners to understand your topic the way you do. The following video provides examples of what vocal variety sounds like.
Vocalics, also known as paralanguage, is the subfield of nonverbal communication that examines how we use our voices to communicate orally. This means that you speak loudly enough for all audience members (even those in the back of the room) to hear you clearly and that you enunciate clearly enough to be understood by all audience members (even those who may have a hearing impairment or who may be English-language learners). If you tend to be soft-spoken, you will need to practice using a louder volume level that may feel unnatural to you at first. For all speakers, good vocalic technique is best achieved by facing the audience with your chin up and your eyes away from your notecards and by setting your voice at a moderate speed. Effective use of vocalics also means that you make use of appropriate pitch, pauses, vocal variety, and correct pronunciation. Just like some of us are more expressive nonverbally, some of us are also more expressive vocally. Even if you are not expressive, vocal delivery skills can be learned and practiced to engage your audience and maintain their attention. Below we will discuss several aspects of vocal delivery you should consider and practice while rehearsing your speech. ArticulationWe are often judged by how well we speak in general. A measure of perceived intellect or education is how well we articulate. That is: how well and correctly we form our vowels and consonants using our lips, jaw, tongue, and palate to form the sounds that are identified as speech. Enunciation refers to how clearly and distinctly sounds are formed. For instance, saying “going to” instead of “gonna” or “did not” instead of “dint” are examples of good versus poor articulation. Pronunciation refers to how a particular word should sound. At times this may be challenging because it’s not always possible to tell how a word should sound by the way it is spelled. Pro tips
Your ability to articulate your speech content accurately will influence your credibility as a speaker. Pitch and Inflection
Pitch refers to the highness or lowness of a speaker’s voice. Some speakers have deep voices and others have high voices. As with one’s singing voice range, the pitch of one’s speaking voice is determined to a large extent by physiology (specifically, the length of one’s vocal folds, or cords, and the size of one’s vocal tract). We all have a normal speaking pitch where our voice is naturally settled, the pitch where we are most comfortable speaking, and most teachers advise speaking at the pitch that feels natural to you. While our voices may be generally comfortable at a specific pitch level, we all have the ability to modulate, or move, our pitch up or down. In fact, we do this all the time. When we change the pitch of our voices, we are using inflection. Just as you can use volume strategically, you can also use pitch inflections to make your delivery more interesting and emphatic. If you ordinarily speak with a soprano voice, you may want to drop your voice to a slightly lower range to call attention to a particular point. How we use inflections can even change the entire meaning of what we are saying. For example, try saying the sentence “I love public speaking” with a higher pitch on one of the words—first raise the pitch on “I,” then say it again with the pitch raised on “love,” and so on. “I love public speaking” conveys a different meaning from “I love public speaking,” doesn’t it? There are some speakers who don’t change their pitch at all while speaking, which is called monotone. While very few people are completely monotone, some speakers slip into monotone patterns because of nerves. One way to ascertain whether you sound monotone is to record your voice and see how you sound. If you notice that your voice doesn’t fluctuate very much, you will need to be intentional in altering your pitch to ensure that the emphasis of your speech isn’t completely lost on your audience. Pro Tips
The effective use of pitch is one of the keys to an interesting delivery that will hold your audience’s attention. Rate
Rate is how fast or slow a person speaks. You can vary the rate depending on the emotions you are feeling or the type of message you are communicating. For example, if you are experiencing joy, you will speak at a fast rate compared to a speaker who is expressing surprise who will speak at a much faster rate. Normally, you speak about 125 words per minute. But you may speak much slower at about 100 wpm if you are giving a slide presentation.
In order to retain clarity of the speech with articulation and inflection, the speaker must be aware that there is a range of appropriate tempo for speaking. If the tempo is too slow, the speech might resemble a monotonous peal. If it is too fast, the articulation could suffer if consonants or vowels are dropped or rushed to keep up the speed. An audience could become frustrated with either extreme. The tempo needs to be appropriate to the speaker’s style while maintaining a comfortable and clear pace is. An ideal speaking rate will allow you to comfortably increase your pace to create a sense of excitement or slow down to emphasize the seriousness of a topic. Pro Tips
Pauses Versus Vocalized Pauses
Pauses can enhance delivery or be filled needlessly and distract the audience. A pause may refer to a rest, hesitation, or temporary stop. It is an interval of silence and may vary in length. The speaker may use pauses to enhance the message delivery or fill the pauses needlessly and distract the audience from the message. You may use a pause to emphasize that the information coming next is important, or to give the audience time to process what you have just said. Consider some of the ways that you might use pauses effectively in your delivery. Effective Pauses
Different types of pauses that could present problems for the speaker: Ineffective Pauses
Pro Tips
ProjectionVolume is the loudness of the speaker. The volume produced by the vocal instrument is projection. Supporting the voice volume with good breathing and energy can be practiced, and helping a speaker develop the correct volume is the main task of a vocal trainer, teacher, or coach. Good vocal support with good posture, breathing, and energy should be practiced regularly, long before a speech is delivered. When speaking naturally without any amplification you need to keep in mind the distance to be covered by your voice. You might compare speaking with the act of throwing a ball. Consider how much more muscular effort is needed to throw the ball a long distance than is required to throw it a short one. As you speak, think of your words as balls and mentally watch them covering the space between you and your audience. Notice how you unconsciously lengthen the voice. If speaking in a face-to-face group without a microphone ask yourself if you are loud enough to be heard by audience members in the last row. Speaking to a large group will require more energy to breathe and control your sound production. While there is no need to shout, a speaker should project to be easily heard from the furthest part of the audience. Even if the speech is amplified with a microphone/sound system, one must speak with projection and energy. As with your rate of speech, you should speak at a volume that comfortably allows you to increase the volume of your voice without seeming to shout or decrease the volume of your voice and still be heard by all audience members. Pro Tips
Practice vocal variation! Find a listening partner. Using only the sounds of “la” ha,” and “oh,” covey the meaning of the following: 1. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen! 2. I’ve fallen and can’t get up! 3. I’ve got a crush on him/her. 4. That soup is disgusting and spoiled. 5. I got an “A” in my Speech Final! If you cannot relay the meaning with just sounds, try a second time (each) with gestures and facial expressions until the listener understands. Then say the lines with the expressive inflections you have developed using only the sounds.
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