Beautiful speech is not a natural gift, but the result of hard work on oneself. Many factors can interfere with beautiful speech: physiology, psyche, characteristics of the language you speak, your attitude towards your listeners, the purpose for which you are addressing them, and much more. Very often, a lot depends on how you speak, especially if you need to convince your interlocutor, win an argument, or convey important information. We decided to figure out what the beauty of speech depends on and how to achieve it.
Word pronunciation speed
Speaking quickly is a bad habit, and for listeners, fast speech can become difficult to understand, which means that communication with you will be unproductive. If it is difficult to listen to your interlocutor, and what he says is not clear, then the most natural reaction is to stop listening.
It is necessary to slow down the pace of speech if you want to be listened to more attentively, and also do not forget about pauses between words and phrases. A pause also gives you the opportunity to take a breath and continue speaking. But nevertheless, you should not speak too slowly, otherwise it will become difficult to listen to you again, as your speech will become too monotonous. Slow down the pace when you need to emphasize a part of the speech, and speed up when you need to add emotion and convey enthusiasm.
Why is this happening
If this sounds familiar to you, this article will help you understand the problem and solve it. Before you think about how to stop stuttering when speaking, you need to find out the root of the problem. There could be 2 reasons:
- Physiological. Indeed, in some individual cases, visiting a speech therapist is the only way to get rid of stammering. There are clinical therapeutic techniques that can be used to make speech much smoother.
- Psychological. The presence of certain barriers prevents you from forming thoughts correctly and speaking beautifully. The problem could be anything - from a fear of dialogue with a person holding a leadership position at your place of work to a basic fear of communication in general. Some people stumble because they simply do not have time to voice their thoughts. Also, the reason may be excessive memorization of phrases when it comes to work.
To correct the situation, you must first control your speech. An impressive amount of time will pass before any skill becomes automatic - just be patient and be prepared to work on yourself.
How to stop stuttering when speaking and be a successful interlocutor
Breathing
Breathing is the basis of speech, without air you cannot make sounds, and how you breathe determines how your speech becomes when produced. Most people breathe too quickly, which leads to swallowing words, shortness of breath and interruptions in sound volume.
The basic rule of breathing is that the diaphragm should be filled with air, not the chest. To observe how correctly you are breathing, place your hand on the bottom of your ribs. As you inhale and exhale, you should feel your stomach expand and your shoulders rise. As a breathing exercise, practice taking deep breaths, allowing the air to escape slowly. This exercise will help you make proper breathing part of your daily life. When speaking long sentences, take a deep breath so that there is enough air until you pause for the next breath. This pause will also allow your listeners to absorb what you have said.
Diction training
You need to start your workout with proper breathing. If you breathe incorrectly, this can lead to a break in your voice, prolonged pauses, and a distortion of the meaning of the phrase. Therefore, during public speaking, speakers do not use ordinary breathing, but speech breathing. Normal breathing may simply not be enough, so it is important to learn how to use air correctly and restore it in time. In this case, use diaphragm breathing. It is developed through a whole system of breathing training, but it requires persistence and a lot of patience.
Next, work begins directly on correct pronunciation - diction. To do this you need to perform simple steps:
- Record your reading of any text on a voice recorder.
- Listen to the resulting recording.
- Let others listen to it.
- Compare your opinion and someone else's.
- Highlight the main disadvantages.
The most common pronunciation errors are:
- incorrect pronunciation of vowel sounds in a weak position (without stress);
- “eating” individual consonant sounds;
- loss of vowel sounds;
- incorrect combination of consonant sounds when they are connected;
- unclear pronunciation of hissing and whistling sounds;
- incorrect pronunciation of soft sounds, etc.
It is advisable to correct diction with the help of specialists. Now there are many organizations where speech therapists work. Of course, the classes are mainly designed for children, but you can take private lessons to quickly achieve the desired effect.
Working on your voice pitch
The pitch of your voice can make a strong impression on those listening to you. If your voice sounds high-pitched or choppy, you may sound nervous. A moderate timbre sounds more convincing and attracts listeners. A low voice tends to be persuasive and dominant.
Don't change the pitch of your voice on purpose to avoid unnaturalness, but nevertheless, it is still worth controlling it to achieve a more balanced and soft speech.
You can raise the pitch of your voice without fear of looking stupid if you want to highlight a certain idea or focus the listener's attention on something specific.
How to speak clearly and intelligibly. Parasite words
Source: iStock
Getting rid of parasitic words is not an easy task. They become a habit, and therefore during a conversation we simply do not notice our speech impediment.
The words “in short”, “well”, “like”, “this”, “as if”, “how to say”, “in general”, “you know”, “actually”, “let’s say”, when repeated many times, destroy all the charm of our presentation, even if we are talking about “smart” things.
Of course, this habit is not so easy to get rid of, which is why we gradually learn to speak without parasites. To do this, you can ask your family or friends to correct you.
As soon as others hear a forbidden word, let them immediately reprimand you. To increase efficiency, come up with a punishment for using filler words.
Get a special piggy bank and put a certain amount of money into it for each mistake you make in a conversation.
There are “punishment boxes” in many offices. In this way, companies are fighting slang and profanity among their employees.
If you are an athlete, you may punish yourself differently. For every parasitic word spoken, force yourself to do push-ups.
It is not convenient to do exercises everywhere and not always, so you can write down tasks in a notebook and complete everything that has accumulated during the day in the evening or the next morning.
Just don't evade punishment. Your best assistant is self-control. Over time, you will speak clearly and intelligibly, the main thing is not to give up.
Vocal exercises
By doing vocal exercises, you can perfectly develop your natural voice. Look in the mirror while you practice - this way you can track errors in articulation and breathing and correct them.
Start yawning to relax your throat and ligaments by moving your lower jaw from side to side while massaging your throat with your fingers and trying to sing the sound.
Take a deep breath and slowly release the air while making a sound until your stomach is completely contracted. Then take a deep breath again and do not breathe for 15 seconds.
Sing the sound “a” first at a natural volume, then quieter and quieter. This exercise can be done with any sound or letter of the alphabet. Use tongue twisters to practice correct pronunciation of sounds and speaking speed.
How to learn to speak clearly and intelligibly. Tongue twister - start speaking clearly.
The profession of a DJ requires a fairly high speed of not only thought processes, but also speech. Unfortunately, not everyone copes with this task, and as a result, sometimes you can hear THIS on the radio! In order for absolutely every word you say to be perceived, and correctly, you need to improve your speech technique every day. Not long ago I talked about lip exercises. But there is something else... These are tongue twisters! If time pressure does not allow you to devote a lot of time to this activity, say tongue twisters several times a day, they really help, and the result is visible in just a couple of weeks. Before you start practicing, remember a few rules:
- In patter, the main thing is not speed, but clarity. You must speak quickly but clearly. No mess or words stuck to each other.
- First, read the tongue twister to yourself, then slowly out loud, then increase the pace, while not forgetting to monitor the clarity of the words.
- If you are at home, you can read the tongue twister with chestnuts behind your cheeks, and then without them - you are guaranteed ease of sound production.
- Another technical technique: read the tongue twister out loud as follows: pronounce the consonants loudly, vowels in a whisper, it helps to get rid of speech constriction.
Now a list of the most effective tongue twisters that helped me out in the most emergency situations:
- In the shallows we lazily caught burbot. In the shallows we lazily caught tench. For love, weren’t you, Mila, the one who begged me and beckoned me into the mists of the estuary?
- King is an eagle (repeat many times)
- The heron wasted away, the heron was dry, the heron was dead (repeat many times)
- The nervous constitutionalist was found assimilated and acclimatized in Constantinople
- Buy a pile of peaks, buy a pile of peaks
- You can’t talk through all the tongue twisters, you can’t talk through all the tongue twisters quickly
- The emotional Varvara felt the emotion of the insensitive Vavila
- Karl stole corals from Clara, Clara stole a clarinet from Karl
- The cap is not sewn in the Kolpakov style, I should repack the cap, but re-cap it
- But I don’t feel sick (repeat many times)
- The Elector compromised the Landsknecht
Reading aloud
In addition to working with volume, pronunciation and pitch, reading aloud is very useful for beautiful speech. Find a text that interests you and read it for yourself. Remember that your posture is as important as your breathing. Stand straight, open your shoulders, don't slouch. Watch your articulation and speed of pronunciation of phrases. Practice until the spontaneous reading sounds satisfactory to you. Such skills will be useful to you in everyday speech.
Advice for those who will practice diction on their own
All classes should begin with exercises to relax the muscles responsible for correct articulation. It is better to follow a certain sequence of exercises. You need to start the exercises with the simplest ones, gradually moving on to more complex ones. You need to exercise every day. Proceed to the next exercise only after the previous one has been fully mastered. Every day you need to set new goals and objectives. The achieved results need to be maintained from time to time by repeating the basic exercises.
What prevents us from speaking beautifully?
Typically, the following factors interfere with learning to speak clearly:
- Physiology.
- Psyche and moral problems.
- Features of the language in which the dialogue is conducted.
- The speaker's attitude towards the audience.
- The purpose for which this or that information is conveyed.
And this is not a complete list, but only the fundamental problems with which you need to start understanding the question of how to learn to speak beautifully and clearly. So what do we need to work on first?
Away with vulgarisms
Your conversation must be scrupulously protected from any kind of familiarity, rudeness and unjustified emotionality. Simplicity and brevity of language are characteristics of a well-educated and well-mannered person. The use of overly pathetic phrases or inappropriately complex vocabulary often indicates a person’s attempt to appear smarter than he is. This is unlikely to have an effect on your interlocutor and is more likely to indicate your frivolity than your high intelligence. And you shouldn’t get too carried away with gestures: it gives an obscene style to the conversation and can harm a person’s reputation (especially business) when meeting.
What can a modern speech therapist offer for the development of speech of a child and an adult?
“The longer I work as a speech therapist, the more new and interesting things I learn,” says Vita Belukha. “Children change, parents change, and we, specialists, must keep up with the times. Today, a speech therapist can use a wide variety of techniques in his work: logorhythmics, music therapy, body-oriented techniques. Music improves the tone of the cerebral cortex and also evokes positive emotions in the child. The motor system is directly related to the development of his mental functions and so on.”
Speech is one of the most complex types of movement, and these movements always have some purpose. After all, we usually speak with a specific purpose, and not just move our tongue, move our lips and strain our larynx. Therefore, if you think about and analyze our usual life, it is impossible to imagine a single sensation that we could get without using movement.
“In my work, I first develop a skill separately - for example, pronouncing sounds in the syllables “ra-ro-ru”, and then combine this with simple movements: for example, hands down - “ra”, hands up - “ro” , arms to the sides - “ru”. And only then I “turn on” more complex activities. As a result, the child’s activities become more complicated, but he still does not lose the acquired skill,” our expert shares the secrets of his technique.
Through physical activity, children are much more interested in working, and the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities are given to them more easily and are better consolidated. This is especially true for children with severe speech impairment (SSD). Using various technologies in speech therapy classes, it is possible to achieve significant improvements in the correction of these problems.
Definition
The most important sign of beautiful speech is clarity. This item includes many nuances. First of all, you need to pay attention not only to each word, but also to each sound in order to pronounce all the words correctly. At first, clear speech may even seem strange and unusual, but when you start speaking this way automatically, it will become much more pleasant to listen to you.
Some recommendations for developing correct speech
Finally, here are some general recommendations from our expert on how to make your speech rich and beautiful:
- read fiction; It’s optimal, especially for children, to choose passages to retell out loud, and even better, to “work for the public,” even if your relatives will play the role of spectators;
- visit theaters, exhibitions, lectures; at any event you will be able to learn new concepts and definitions that have not been encountered before, you can even write them down and use them on occasion;
- expand your social circle, include as many educated, cultured people as possible, participate in disputes and discussions, your cultural level will develop, and you will learn to speak correctly and beautifully.
