Many of our students are high achievers, and they want their speech to be as sharp as a sword with which they conquer the world. They take our elocution lessons to feel confident to: - run meetings, - speak in front of a large international audience, - present sales pitches, - dominate in political debates, - speak in the High Court of Justice, - create educational video courses in the world's top universities, and so on. In other words, they want people to listen to them. We first work on the clarity of their speech and help them master RP (Received Pronunciation, actors master RP in drama schools in order to play upper-class characters in classic plays).
However, intonation and inflection are even more important if you want to sound interesting so that others enjoy listening to you. Here is just one example of how different patterns of inflection can be used. Most of the time we would use a simple falling inflection at the end of a sentence. Within a sentence that has separate phrases, we would use a rising inflection at the end of each phrase and finish the sentence with a falling inflection. Here are a couple of examples: “The plane, which is flying to America, was delayed.” ”The giant, who was called Bill, was very frightening.”
Using rising inflection where appropriate will make the speech much more interesting.
Usually, people sound really boring and even depressing if they constantly use a simple falling inflection. What I have noticed is that often people from a particular culture have a habit of using simple falling most of the time (for example, in an authoritarian culture like Russia). When I asked them to say something differently (with simple rising inflection or circumflex rising) they told me they felt unnatural. Indeed, our intonation and inflection are influenced by the environment we grew up in. Often, we outgrow or change our childhood environment and lift ourselves to the next level. Therefore, one might ask: Is the way I speak fitting my current environment?
When we record our students’ speech, they are often shocked to hear the way they sound. They want to do exercises that can help them sound more interesting.
I want to share these exercises with you.
1. Listen to good RP speakers; a small section at a time, a minute long or less
2. Analyse their inflection and make a note of when it rises and when it falls
3. Copy them
To eliminate the habit of constantly using simple falling, try this simple exercise: instead of telling people what to do, ask them to do it, and instead of demanding, ask for a favour. When we ask a question, our inflection rises.
It will also be useful to get rid of negative words in your vocabulary. Think about how you can avoid sounding negative. For example, instead of saying "We had another slow day", just say what happened: "Today our sales reached the same levels as yesterday".
You can learn and practise intonation/inflection and voice modulation with the apps Fluent English Speech and Power, Pitch, Pace, Pause. The functionality of the app is ideal: you can listen, repeat and compare your pronunciation and intonation with the model.
More on www.batcsglobal.com/elocution-lessons
