People can often get obsessed with the way they sound on radio or video playback. Changing how you talk can seem tempting, but is it the right choice to make?
You may not notice that you regularly drop your G’s and say runnin’ rather than running or singin’ rather than singing, but chances are someone watching or listening to your interview will.
In recent years, we seem to have found it only proper to flood people we’ve never met before with criticism about how they speak, especially on social media.
It’s happened to many people who are visible in the media. Sky political editor Beth Rigby suffered a tirade after dropping her G’s when talking about education. Rylan Clarke, the presenter on the One Show, was roundly criticised by some on social media that he couldn’t pronounce his Ts properly.
Why Some People Change the Way They Talk and Why Some Don’t
It used to be more common for someone with a strong regional accent to change their diction, particularly if they wanted to be on TV. Of course, for all the right reasons, that changed. But there’s still a sense with some people that ‘improving’ their accent makes a difference in how they are perceived.
Criticism, however unfounded, still prevails. Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner often gets posts denigrating her regional accent, even going as far as to say that she sounds ‘thick’.
The BBC first allowed someone with a regional accent to present the news as far back as 1941 but even back then there was criticism that his voice was either difficult to understand or made the news less believable.
Today there are a wide range of different accents on television and on other media such as radio. Diversity in accents may cause consternation in some parts of social media but its benefits are readily accepted and hardly noticed by most.
Why It’s Important to Be Yourself
Changing accent or the way you talk can work for some people, but it more regularly makes the individual sound a little unnatural. Most of us are shocked when we hear our voice played back to us through a recording.
However self-conscious you might be, it’s important to talk naturally and be yourself, whether you have a regional accent or regularly drop your G’s and T’s.
What you may want to look at if you are trying to improve authenticity and clarity, is to cut down on filler words. In any conversation, most of us use these naturally without thinking – they are words like ‘so’ and ‘well’ when we are answering a question. If we use these words too much, they can be repetitive, and the audience may well find it annoying.
Another thing you can do without changing the core nature of your voice and language is to slow down your speech a little. When we’re nervous or under pressure, which often happens in an interview, we can tend to speed up the way we talk as we try to get all that valuable information out. What you shouldn’t be changing is who you are.
Apart from these small tweaks, in general you shouldn’t worry about your accent or whether you drop word endings or not. They are certainly not as important as what you want to get across to the audience and making too many changes can mean you sound inauthentic.
Media Training is a great way to work through these issues and many more, so you are confident and prepared when representing yourself or your company to the media. Talk to the team at Hawkeye today to book your training.