Greetings, folks! Writing articles is much easier than talking. When you write, it’s always possible to think over a thought, print it, and then fix it or wipe it off the page completely. In conversation, unfortunately, there are no such opportunities. You need to immediately express your thoughts competently, be able to speak interestingly and speak clearly, so that the interlocutor is pleasant to listen to you. Since my spoken language is far from perfect, I decided to learn how to speak beautifully and correctly. The information that helped me personally is collected in this article.
What do you mean by “speaking beautifully” and why it’s important to learn how to speak beautifully.
We all want to be free to explain ourselves to other people, to convey our thoughts easily, to be able to interest the interlocutor and to look dignified in his eyes. This helps us reach a certain level of success and become popular.
Let us describe a well-defined speech:
leisurely;
light, without long embarrassing pauses and unexpected stuttering;
there’s no profanity or vocabulary or parasitic words;
the narrative can be called meaningful;
is accompanied by moderate gesticulation and mimicry;
sounds emotional, not monotonous.
The ability to speak clearly, consistently and convincingly is useful in all spheres of life and will help in any situation. Whether you are a professor in an institute or a teacher in a school, a businessman, a sales manager – with the help of speech you will be able to fix the attention of the audience or achieve the signing of an important contract.
The art of eloquence will come in handy for anyone. It allows you to influence people, manage their actions and actions, charge the audience with your energy and mood. In the end, by mastering this art, you will easily become the soul of the company, will be able to brilliantly perform in front of people and successfully negotiate.
To perform beautifully and convincingly, the speaker himself must be an energetic, educated, well-read and confident person. Only in this way he can mesmerize the audience, to arouse confidence and sympathy, to penetrate into human souls and to motivate people. And it’s good if the person knows how to develop charisma. Then the listeners will definitely want to realize their secret dreams and start acting actively.
But that’s the emotional side of the question. It is often parsed in various motivational and inspirational trainings, which teach how to become a leader. However, sometimes a person just needs to put a clear, intelligible, confident speech with a competent and logical narrative. It includes the following mandatory elements:
diction (clear pronunciation of sounds);
tempo (ability to speak slowly or quickly, without stopping or tarator);
loudness of voice;
intonation;
literacy;
rich vocabulary;
purity (no parasite words);
accuracy (use of most appropriate words to express thought, structured narration without “water”);
expressiveness (metaphors, comparisons, synonyms, figurative expressions and other language means).
A person’s conversational skill begins to be developed from birth. Parents constantly communicate with the child, read to him fairy tales, teach him poetry – all this contributes to the formation of correct and beautiful speech. But an adult person will have to develop their conversation skills independently.
Working on speech technique.
Form and content are the main aspects that characterize speech. Form is the technical side of the question. It includes: diction, loudness of voice, pace of speech. Content is understood to be semantic content, i.e. properly designed thoughts, competently constructed speech, ability to lead a discussion, rich vocabulary. For speech to sound beautiful, it has to be thought out.
Work on speech skills is quite a long process. It includes the following areas:
Dictionary training;
practicing speech technique;
speech development (increase in vocabulary, purification from parasitic words).
Dictionary training
Diction is called correct and clear pronunciation of sounds. If you have disorders in this area, you can identify them in one of the following two ways:
By yourself using a voice recorder;
using a speech therapist, a speech therapist.
In the first case, you need to read aloud a passage of text (better if it is an audiobook text spoken by a professional actor) and write it down on the recorder. Then listen to the recording, compare it with the actor and highlight the shortcomings. For reliability, let someone else close to you listen to this recording. Let them also share their opinions. This will help you to identify diction errors, which will have to work on in the future.
In the second case, I advise to contact a speech therapist – a specialist who deals with diagnosis and correction of speech defects in people of different ages. Most often, a speech therapist is contacted by parents whose children speak badly. It is at preschool age, the easiest way to put the correct pronunciation. However, do not be embarrassed speech therapist, if you are not a child for a long time, and problems with diction have not gone anywhere.
The most common dictionary disorders:
cartelism;
whispering;
stuttering;
indistinct whistling sounds;
“swallowing” individual sounds, etc.
Regular lessons with a speech therapist will help you to put the correct pronunciation and fix it rather quickly.
Systematic training of the speech system is also important. It is essential to do exercises at least once a day:
perform articulation exercises;
read out loud poems or prose by clearly speaking every sound;
Speak up the conversations.
When speaking patterned conversations, place nuts or candy on the cheeks. It is likely to be very difficult to understand what you are trying to say at first. But gradually you will overcome resistance, and your pronunciation will become clearer. It’s an exercise regularly performed by speakers and actors.
It’s a speech training exercise.
For speech to sound beautiful, in addition to diction, it is necessary to work on its elements.
The intonation. With its help, speech becomes “alive”, emotionally colored and expressive. Reading out loud with expression is a great way to practice. Read the plays as if you were playing on stage, trying to express the emotions of the characters as plausible as possible.
Speech rate. Speed of pronunciation has a very strong influence on how interlocutors perceive what you are saying. Too slow speech puts you to sleep, people lose a thread of conversation. And too fast a pace makes you listen hard to the conversation to catch the main idea. Eventually, the listener has to ask around.
The loudness and strength of the voice. It is very important to learn how to control the power and volume of the voice so that during the conversation, do not whisper and do not fall off the scream. It is usually advisable to speak at 30% louder than usual, as if you wanted to be heard by the person behind you. By the way, most people involuntarily start speaking louder, especially when they meet friends or acquaintances on the street.
The volume of the voice. Volume is the “breast” voice that sounds like a chest. It’s deeper, soundier, stronger and more pleasant. The following exercise will help you achieve a three-dimensional voice: place your hand on your chest and say the vowels “a”, “u”, “s”, “o”, “e”. During the pronunciation you will feel your hand vibrating in your chest. Try to strengthen it. To achieve the effect, do this exercise daily for 5-10 minutes.
Breathe. During conversation try to breathe calmly and dimensionally. Then the voice will sound confidently, the timbre will become softer, and speech more quietly. If you breathe too often and intermittently, the sound of the voice will become weak and unstable. You can learn how to breathe properly through special practices.
Let us dwell on one of the most common mistakes associated with pronunciation – too fast a pace of speech. When a person speaks, it is very difficult to hear. In addition, in a hurry to tell everything as soon as possible, he begins to swallow individual words, and in general, can say more.
To stop talking and swallowing words, you need to learn to control the pace of conversation. Proper breathing will really help here. Before you say anything, try to take a moderately deep breath, calm down and think about what you absolutely have nowhere to rush. To practice speaking speed, you can speak out loud at a slow pace, for example, a sequence of numbers from 1 to 100. The more often you practice, the quicker you can get used to speaking slowly.
Speech development
More and more people are unable to build sentences competently, do not know the meaning of many words, abuse parasitic words and profanity. I think this is mainly due to the fact that most people prefer to watch TV or go to the cinema instead of reading an interesting book. But that’s not who we are. At least you’re already reading this article, and I’m writing it for you. So we continue to develop our speech.
The right sentence structure…
It is very difficult to understand a person who is jumping from topic to topic during a conversation, painfully long trying to pick up the right words and can not make the right sentences, depriving his story of logic.
But the order of words is very important. This is taught at school in the Russian language lessons. Because of the wrong word order, the meaning of the sentence is distorted and can even cause laughter. Here are some examples of semantic errors.
Residents of the house demanded repairs and repairs (What did the residents demand? Make repairs or fix it?).
The landlord kicked a dog with his leg, which immediately offended and ran away (Is the leg offended and ran away?).
After a few years, he met her again. It was already, unfortunately, a 39-year-old married lady (He is sorry that she is 39 years old? Or that she is married?).
To avoid making such mistakes in conversation, I advise you to do the following:
Raise your literacy with the help of Russian language textbooks and reference books;
to read at least 30 minutes every day – it’s best to give preference to fiction, publicism, special development books.
paraphrase what you have read – just make sure to check how consistently and logically you repeat the text.
Increasing vocabulary
Poor vocabulary prevents the full expression of thoughts, forcing a person to constantly stutter in search of the right word. Such speech sounds intermittent and monotonous, because the same words are used, and in general it makes a repulsive impression.
Regular vocabulary replenishment will ensure the following actions.
Daily reading of quality literature. Be sure to have a notebook, where you will write out the most favorite phrases, smart expressions. At the right time, the right quote will pop up in your memory and decorate your speech.
Work with the explanatory dictionary. As soon as you meet a new word, be sure to clarify its meaning in the explanatory dictionary. You can write out a word and try to remember it, but only in the context to avoid incorrect use of the term in the future.
Solving crossword puzzles, scan puzzles and other games for which you need to have an extensive vocabulary.
Selecting synonyms. This is an excellent practice for supplementing the thesaurus, which will help to avoid tautology during conversation. Now there are various applications for smartphones that help you to select synonyms.
Get rid of parasitic words.
Parasite words include words and phrases devoid of any semantic load:
well;
in short;
that’s it;
like;
here you go;
like, et cetera.
Most often a person pronounces them unconsciously to fill in the pause. The insidiousness of parasite words is that their use becomes a bad habit. It can only be eradicated by conscious effort. Here are some tips.
Write down any conversation you have with friends or family on your dictaphone.
Listen to the tape and identify parasitic words.
Teach yourself to speak a little slower than you’re used to, so you can realize the moment when you want to say a bad word. It’s better to take a short pause.
Ask relatives, friends and acquaintances to make comments as soon as they hear the parasite word. And to make your interlocutors even more motivated and more eager to listen to your speech, pay them 50 rubles for each slipped “parasite”. This way you will better control yourself, or you will go bankrupt.
It’s gonna be tough at first. After all, the eradication of bad habits requires tremendous effort, powerful self-discipline and control. It will take 2 to 3 weeks of hard work to clear your speech from “slag”.
Speech Training
The best exercise for staging speech is quality conversation practice. Someone who just talks a lot does not always speak really well. Strive to ensure that during any conversation your speech is coherent, thoughtful, argued. Dialogues are good for building a logical course of thought. Discuss with friends read books, watched movies, various events.
Here are some recommendations, the implementation of which will help you in the formulation of speech.
Read and retell. I have already written that reading is good for enriching vocabulary, developing memory and thinking. By paraphrasing what you have read, you will better understand and memorize the material, learn new words and phrases, different turns of speech.
Write. If you need to speak to an audience, make sure you write down your speech on paper. Reread it, see what else you can add or remove, whether the logic is not broken, whether there are any semantic errors. Remember that the best improvisation is well rehearsed.
Watch the speeches of famous speakers. But not to motivate yourself, but to analyze the performance. Note all the important details: how the performance is structured, how the speaker moves, what his gestures, facial expressions, timbre of voice and tempo of speech are. If you are particularly caught up in a speech, try to write it down on memory paper. Then imagine you are speaking to a large audience and read your speech out loud. Record your speech on camera. Review it, noting the mistakes and moments you have to work on.
As you can see, there are no special secrets in staging a beautiful speech. It takes work on yourself and constant practice to achieve good results.
Conclusion
Now you know what you have to do to make your speech sound beautiful, and what is the name of the person who teaches you to speak correctly. Read aloud, get rid of parasitic words, pronounce patterned words, add to your vocabulary, write aphorisms and eloquent phrases to communicate, paraphrase what you’ve read and practice a lot.