Our experience is that working on your diction – the mouth part of the model we just explored (called Control) is one of the quickest ways to make yourself more easily understood.
In other parts of this training we look in more detail about how your voice and accent can affect your impact on your audience: we don’t suggest working on your accent, particularly, but if you can increase your diction and clarity it can help your audience hugely. The research says, in short, that if the audience has to work harder to understand you because of your accent – or anything else! – they make subconscious assumptions of how much you know about your topic, how worthwhile your presentation is and so on.
The more precisely and accurately you make these modifications, the more clear your spoken voice will be. Control is the basis of ‘diction’. This 40 second video shows you what we mean… first you’ll hear speech without diction and then with better diction.