56. How to Sound Natural While Reading a Script | Podcasting Tips for Delivery

Nothing turns a podcast listener away faster than a robotic, scripted delivery. However, scripting can be incredibly helpful for you as a host to organize your thoughts and stay on track. In fact, I script most of my episodes! Today, I’m sharing tips and tricks for reading from a script while still sounding natural and engaging, so you can strike the perfect balance between authenticity and structure.

This episode was produced by me, The Podcast Teacher! Contact me at Hello@ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey, hey, and welcome back. I've shared on the podcast before about how I use a script to record these episodes. And I get comments all the time that are like, I would never know that you use a script. You sound so natural. Now I'm a perfectionist and my own worst critic, so I still save room for improvement. But I will acknowledge that I'm better at this than most. And, of course, I certainly appreciate the kind words. I attribute my skills to the fact that I spent 12 years reading picture books to elementary schoolers as the library teacher.

5 year olds can be a tough crowd. They are not afraid to tell you if they're bored. So I've had lots of practice reading books, AKA scripts, and making them sound interesting. But since that's probably not your scenario, I'm gonna share some tips with you today that will help you to not sound scripted when reading from a script. Let's start out by briefly talking about why you may want to use a script for your podcast in the first place. Scripting can help you to organize your thoughts and ideas so that you can convey the information to your audience in the best way possible. You don't have to worry about losing your train of thought or coming up with an example on the spot. Those are things that I struggle with.

As solopreneurs, listeners are tuning into our shows to learn something, so you should be conveying that information in the most helpful way possible. And often scripting helps to accomplish that. Scripting also helps to prevent you from getting off track and going on tangents that aren't really relevant to the topic at hand. Scripting is not the best fit for everyone, though, and I go into detail about the pros and cons of scripting in episode 11 of this podcast. So scroll back and give that one a listen if you're wondering whether or not scripting would be good for you. But for this episode, I'm going to assume that you're interested in scripting. Of course, you don't want it to sound like you're reading a script. If you come across as stiff, unnatural, and boring, that doesn't make for a good listening experience.

So here are some tips to help you sound more natural. Tip number 1 is to listen to yourself and get an understanding of what you naturally sound like. What sounds natural for someone else may sound very unnatural for you. The whole point of using a podcast as a marketing tool as a solopreneur is to allow your audience to get to know you. So you definitely don't want to sound like one person on your podcast and then a completely different person when they hop on a call with you or enroll in your program. You want to sound like your true, authentic, and natural self on your podcast. So listen to yourself to identify the characteristics that make up what your true, authentic, and natural self sounds like. So listen to and analyze a recording of yourself where you're speaking casually and normally.

If you do q and a sessions or coaching calls in your business, those are great for this. Or next time you're on a casual Zoom call, just see if you can record it. When you're listening to a recording of yourself, take note of when and how you use filler words. How fast or slow you speak, when you breathe, whether you tend to speak in long run on sentences or short fragments of thoughts, and so on. Some of these things are going to be undesirable habits that we don't necessarily want to replicate, but others are going to help us understand what we're striving for when we say we're trying to sound, quote, unquote, natural. Okay. Tip number 2, write like you normally speak. When you're writing out your script, write it as if you're saying it out loud.

Listen to the dialogue that's kind of going along in your head. Here's where you can apply what you've learned about your particular style of natural from listening to yourself on those recordings. My scripts are filled with red squiggly lines because, apparently, I don't always use proper grammar when I'm speaking casually, and that's okay. If you're just talking with a friend, you're probably not always using complete sentences. There are no periods or commas when speaking. So in my scripts, there are a lot of dots to indicate when I'm transitioning into the next thought. This is one of the biggest reasons that I don't recommend getting AI like chat gpt to write a script for you. A, it's not going to sound as much like you even if you train it with your style, and, b, it's going to write complex and grammatically correct sentences that don't sound like natural and imperfect speech.

When writing out the script, I also use bold and or italics, or I will write a word in all caps to indicate emphasis. Doing this helps to remind me in the moment of reading it out loud how I envisioned it sounding when I wrote it. I also break up the text visually when writing out the script. My scripts are usually only a sentence or 2 together before a paragraph break. This helps to create the places to pause and breathe in a natural way. Alright. I feel like that was 5 mini tips in 1, but we're gonna go ahead and move on to official tip number 3. Practice reading it out loud before recording.

Seriously, out loud. There is something weird where if you're reading something silently, your brain internally autocorrects anything. But when you literally read it out loud, you're able to identify missing words, mistakes, or awkward portions. If you read something more than once and trip over the words when you're practicing, you're probably going to trip over the words when you read it for real, so it's a good idea to reword that section. During this practice, you also want to vary your pace a bit. Speak slower or faster depending on the content and the message that you're conveying and also any emotion that you're trying to get across. Vary the pitch and inflection of your voice so that it doesn't sound monotone. Don't overthink this though.

I want you to be aware of it, but don't try too hard because that can then have the opposite effect. Just go with what's natural. So, for example, if you're really excited about something, you're probably naturally going to speak faster to convey your enthusiasm. So all I'm saying is to embrace that kind of thing. Also, if you naturally talk with your hands, which most of us do, you can incorporate that into your practice as well. Trying to remain still when it's unnatural for you can cause your delivery to come across as stiff. Even if you're not on camera, your speech will be more relaxed if you're doing what you normally do with your body when you're talking. Just don't get so animated that you make a lot of noise or whack the microphone.

I might have done that a handful of times. And, finally, don't be afraid to go off script and adlib a little bit. I use the script as a solid 90% of my episode, and then I inevitably end up adding in a few thoughts as I am recording. Some people say that they don't like scripted shows. I personally think that there's nothing wrong with a scripted show as long as it doesn't sound scripted, and that's a skill that can be developed. So keep working on it, and you'll get better over time. Eventually, your listeners won't be able to tell which segments are scripted and which ones are impromptu thoughts. Until next time, happy podcasting.