You’ve heard the advice before: Be conversational, sound like a human being, don’t just read–communicate! But where do you start?
For Carrie Johnson, NPR’s Justice Department correspondent, it all starts with the script. She had a career in print before joining NPR, spent 10 years at the Washington Post, and was more than comfortable being interviewed on radio and TV about her stories. But this new job was a puzzlement.
“How to read lines from a page in front of me without SOUNDING like I’m reading?” she asked herself. “It’s much more difficult than it appears.”
Johnson’s solution was to pay close attention to her script, specifically the layout. Here are her top suggestions:
- Each line of script should be just one line. Double space between lines.
- Capitalize words you want to emphasize.
- Use elipses…to remind yourself to stop and breathe.
- Punch up a line by adding a separate phrase at the end.
Journalist Sam Sanders, who hosts the podcast “Into It,” says he’s spent a lot of time focusing on the way he sounds, “trying to find new ways of making me sound like me.” For him, part of the solution was to throw out some of the rules of written grammar, using phrases such as “kinda like” or “really good” in his scripts.
“It took me years to get to the point where I can write how I talk,” he says. “And I think the one thing that helps me keep doing that is to read over every script out loud, to myself, before I edit, and before I track. I ask myself this question, ‘Is that how I would actually say that sentence, in the real world?'”
What that routine has forced him to do is to stick mostly to the subject-verb-object sentence structure without a lot of clauses. As he tells beginners, “even if you can’t write perfectly to your voice just yet, remembering the SVO structure will at least help keep your scripting clear.”
On the air, this kind of work sounds effortless, and that’s the goal, Sanders says. Behind the scenes, though, it takes a lot of practice.
If you want to sound like yourself, the best advice may be to invest some time in figuring out what that really means and how you can achieve it.
