Overcoming your “accent”

When I worked at CBS I was often asked where in the Midwest I was from. I’ve never lived a day of my life in the Midwest. No one in my immediate family was from the Midwest. But apparently, I sounded like I’d grown up in Iowa or Illinois. How did that happen?

I knew that I tended to absorb and reflect the way people around me talked. When I went to college in North Carolina I came home for Christmas with a Southern drawl. So it made sense that I’d picked up a particular way of speaking from the people I worked with. The anchors and reporters in my newsroom sounded much the same, like they all came from the Midwest (even though most of them didn’t).

It was so unusual for anyone to have a non-Midwestern accent on the air that listeners definitely noticed anyone who did. Fred Graham, CBS’s law correspondent, was born in Arkansas, went to high school in Nashville, Tennessee, and still sounded like it. I once heard a woman with a pronounced Southern accent gush at him, “Mr. Graham, you’re the only one on CBS that I can understand!”

It turns out that what most of us spoke was “Standard American English.” And what exactly is that? It’s what news directors all over the country are looking for when they tell job applicants to “lose the accent.” It’s speech that is generally perceived as lacking any regional characteristics, even though it clearly is representative of a region–the Midwest.

Why did this form of speech become the “standard?” The smart people over at NPR’s Code Switch dedicated an episode of their podcast to finding out. It’s well worth a listen.

Have you ever been rejected for a broadcast job because of the way you sound? What did you do about it?

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