By Olga Smith
Speech has always been the number one tool for ruling classes. Today everybody is talking about Prince's Andrew speech content. I have analyzed his speech from a technical point of view. I was paying attention to sentence stress, the use of schwa to throw away unimportant words and even whole expressions. In my opinion, his speech is a great resource for speech raining.
I receive a lot of questions about how to make one's speech less monotonous, what to stress, how to stress important messages and which words convey the most important meaning. There is a number of speech techniques that you can learn from our books Get Rid of your Accent Part Two and apps Fluent English Speech and 4Ps, Power, Pitch, Pace, Pause. Michael Knowles, the actor in our audiobooks and apps sounds very similar to the Prince.
In this blog, I will outline a few of these techniques.
1. In natural speech, it’s important not to emphasize or stress too many words in a phrase or sentence. As a general rule, we tend to pick out the words which convey the meaning and lean on them, giving them a little more vocal energy. Prince Andrew's speech is a good example of it. He is very economical with the stress, but when he stresses a word it really stands out. He stressed words:"never", "absolutely not", "certainly", "always", "sole", "inappropriate", etc.
2. There is no consistent rule as to which words to stress and which "to throw away". It depends on what message a speaker wishes to convey to his/her listener.
3. “Throw away” unimportant words. This often means neutralizing vowels, increasing the pace and diminishing the volume. It is a difficult skill to learn, particularly for non-native speakers of English. and one should take time to master it. Prince Andrew threw away "fill in" expressions such as: "as it were", "if you see what I mean", "you see, this is the problem", "that would be", etc.
The quickest way to master your speech is to book your speech analysis and follow up with a few Skype sessions.