Try This Weird Trick to Improve Your Public Speaking

It's time to unlearn everything you know about periods and commas.

Transcript

00:00How do you read something aloud without it sounding like you're reading aloud, question

00:08mark?

00:09Because here's the thing, nobody wants to be read to.

00:12Professionals are not children at bedtime.

00:18It's so hard to follow someone when they sound like they're reading.

00:22Instead, people have a much easier time following something if it sounds like you're speaking,

00:27whether it's at a business meeting or on stage to 1,000 people.

00:31You have to move the spacing around to places where the periods and the commas are not.

00:36It's going to sound really strange to do, but it actually sounds really good to hear.

00:42To give you a sense of what that sounds like, here is the beginning of a script from my

00:47podcast Pessimists Archive.

00:49There was a plague.

00:51Well, there have been many plagues, more plagues than you can imagine, more plagues than I

00:55had any idea about, most of them far less famous than the plague, and, well, we'll get

01:01to that later.

01:02But for now, we're just focusing on the plague of the year 686.

01:08See how that works?

01:09I wasn't playing to how it was written.

01:11I was playing to how it sounds.