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VOICE ACTING This Is Impor'ant: It's Risky To Drop Those Medial Consonants! June 11, 2019  By Ann UtterbackVoice Specialist and Author, Broadcast Voice Handbook I've written several articles on plosive consonants in ending positions
and in clusters. But a colleague of mine recently asked about the
dropping of medial consonants. She said she hated the recent trend to
say, "impor'ant," instead of "important." I agree with her on this, so I
thought I'd give you some ways to work on this problem. RISKY OMISSION First, if you omit these sounds you run a couple of risks. You can
sound not as smart as you are, and you might be difficult to
understand. Let's say you omit the /t/ sound in "certainly." If you're
speaking fast, it could come out as "surly." Now, I must tell you, as I told her, that fixing the problem of
medial consonants is not as easy as some of the other consonant issues. Ending consonants are super easy to fix. Check out this post
for some tips on that. Consonant clusters are a bit more of a
challenge, but there aren't many of those in speech. But almost every
word has at least one medial consonant. THE TRICKY WORDS Granted, not all of these cause
problems, but certain words that we say often do call for these
consonants to be distinct. Here are a few:
Some of the words above can actually become different words when you
drop the medial, plosive consonant. For example, "winter" becomes
"winner" and "center" becomes "sinner." I don't think any football
center wants to be called a sinner! HOW TO FIX IT So how do you do the work to change these errors? First, you have to
be sure you know how to make a consonant plosive correctly. I cover
this in an earlier article, so click here to read about perfecting your consonant production. Next, record yourself, and listen for any medial consonants that you
might be dropping. Or you can have a friend do this for you. Finally, it works well to divide the word you're working on into two
different words for practice. "Important," for example, would be
practiced first as "impor" "Tant." Repeat the word this way many times
each day, exaggerating the /t/ sound. After a few days of this practice,
merge the words together, and see if you can still keep the /t/ in the
word. If you can, repeat the process of saying the word over and over
for a several days until it sounds natural. At first it won't, but
don't despair. If you keep up this practice, your medial consonants
will stop being stumbling blocks. Lots of practice with this pays off. ------------------------------------  ABOUT ANNAnn
S. Utterback, Ph.D., is a voice specialist with more than 40 years
experience and has helped hundreds of people make the most of their
voices, working with broadcasters, voice over artists and podcasters
around the world. An author of eight books and over 50 articles on
voice, her Broadcast Voice Handbook is a classic textbook offering more advice on
how to improve your voice over performance.
Web: http://OnlineVoiceCoaching.comClick for: Broadcast Voice Handbook |
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Comments (2)
Mike
7/1/2021 at 5:30 PM
Bravo! Let's not go all false Cockney in the name of some kind of race-to-the-bottom class solidarity.
j. valentino
6/11/2019 at 4:39 PM
Interesting. But doesn't this contradict the trend to sound "natural", not polished, etc? I think a lot of people have had to un-learn proper pronunciation to accommodate the deluge of requests for "conversational" or "not-announcer-like" or "Morgan Freeman-esque" requests. Approachable, friendly, should be real/genuine sounding, not over-played, not over the top, no affected, authentic, etc.
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