For a while there it looked as though the sound system wasn’t working worth beans. We might have to dispense with the microphone and go into full-throttle classroom bellow.
“Well, I suppose it’s OK,” said my fellow speaker. “I gave my last talk at the Opera last night and so it doesn’t really matter if I put my voice out this morning.”
However, technology’s attempt to cook our goose failed as an AV person managed to track down and solve the problem. We had microphones. No classroom bellowing, and no resultant hoarseness for my fellow speaker. I would have been perfectly all right, given my constant need to project throughout sizeable classrooms. I have stainless-steel vocal cords by now.
Well, that’s an overstatement. At the beginning of every school year I got through a week or two of vocal discomfort and scratchiness as my voice re-hardens to the challenges of being a large-classroom lecturer. If I go through a long period of near-silence (such as sitting a long retreat), my voice deteriorates to a husky croak as my vocal cords become slack and flabby from disuse. Overall I think it does them good, as long as the enforced rest doesn’t last for too long.
We teachers and lecturers make their living with our voices just as much as with our skill and accumulated experience. We must not only protect our voices, but work on our diction, speed, clarity, enunciation, and pronunciation. The most brilliant ideas in the world are compromised if they are expressed through a spray of uhs and ums and stutters. The most scintillating content can be ruined by flat delivery. Even the most carefully planned and enthusiastically delivered talk can be sabotaged by irritating verbal tics.
I remember one chap who tended to mess up the end of his sentences. He would be rolling along just fine, then as the end of the sentence approached he would lunge forward at high speed, drop his voice to a near whisper, and then follow the sentence with a crisp “OK???” No doubt he thought of it as amusing, cheerful, perhaps a bit sparkling. His listeners were missing the end of each sentence and were becoming notably more and more exasperated with him. A few even started chirping back “OK!!” at regular intervals.
Not good. He needed a vocal coach. Alas, he wasn’t the type to accept coaching or criticism, so his public-speaking career was mercifully short and undistinguished.
Then there are the over-prepared and oh-so-consciously-clear speakers. They’re irritating only if they adamantly refuse to let any butter melt in their mouths or depart, even momentarily, from their meticulously-written scripts. These aren’t really talks at all, but public readings. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d rather read the paper myself instead of listening to the author tip-toe through it. Fortunately, most of those types lighten up as an idea or story occurs to them at the moment.
Good public speaking is rare. People become wooden, stilted, or almost hysterically animated. I’ve gone through my own spate of learning stumbles; at one point I spoke far too fast for comfort. Speaking too quickly remains my single biggest hurdle to overcome; I’ve made enormous progress, but from time to time I still spray the room with machine-gun staccato.
Good voices are even rarer. I recall cringing under the delivery of a young woman whose voice was just plain ugly, strident and hard-edged. For emphasis she would drop her tone by about half and octave then SPEAK — EVERY — WORD — WITH — LOCK-JAWED — EMPHASIS, as though she were speaking sternly to an unruly child. It was unnerving, to say the least, not to mention downright insulting.
Yet good speaking can be found, and sometimes in unlikely places. A quiet teacher can turn out to possess an innate talent, or a lifelong introvert can discover his hidden extrovert. You just never know. But all of us share the use of the voice in common, the use of language in a particularly pure form—just talking to people, one word after another, building sentences and paragraphs and all the rest. Instant writing, in other words, meant for immediate consumption and instant comprehension.