What do I mean when I refer to a conversational tone or conversational delivery? I'm going to give you three minutes on what I'm talking about there, and it really involves two pieces of what we refer to as vocalics. And this is discussed in some detail in your textbook, but I wanted to be as... clear as I can be about when I talk about conversational tone, either in feedback that I provide you or in helping you to prepare for a presentation, what am I talking about?
It's basically these two things. First, pitch. So, pitch is the highness or lowness of your voice and not in volume, but, you know, speaking with a high...
high? high pitch or a low pitch and what you're looking for is to modulate between the two so that which you do all the time when you're having a conversation with a friend if you're chatting a church or you know over a cup of coffee or over the back fence you don't speak in a monotone voice generally you you are using a variety of pitch to And it just sort of comes naturally. However, when we get into a stressful situation, such as a presentation like this, particularly if you're reading the paper you wrote for the presentation, you can become very monotone or repetitive.
In other words, you can drop your tone at the end of each sentence. And Joe and Martha went up the hill. And then they fetched a pail of water. I know it wasn't Joe and Martha.
It was Jack and Jill, but you get my point. Or the opposite is you can rise at the end of each sentence. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. Either of those is fine. Doing it once or twice, doing it for the entire five or six or seven minutes of a presentation is not what you're looking for. So, you want to get a variety of pitch.
Modulate. pitch and it takes some practice to get it to feel more like it's what you sound when you're not delivering presentation second is rate how quickly do you speak and what we tend to do when we're stressed is we speed up our speech particularly if we see the time and we're worried that we're not going to get it all in and so we just start to say the words a lot faster again what you want to do some people speak very quickly I tend to speak very quickly Rapid use of words. I have made a serious effort to slow myself down when I'm speaking in front of a group, particularly when I'm presenting to you, when I'm preparing a lesson for you. I have to consciously think about, actually, I consciously think about both of these.
How is my pitch? Am I modulating my tone? And am I speaking?
too quickly? Am I tending to speed up? What happens is, on both of these, you'll tend to get it okay in the first minute or so if you're paying attention, but then as you go, you know, if you haven't really rehearsed it and it hasn't become a bit of a second nature to you, you tend to lose the modulation and you tend to speed up. So, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about a conversational tone, modulating your pitch. and keeping the rate at which you're speaking your words, you know, at not too fast, not too slow, and trying to keep it understandable for your audience.