417. I sound like a robot! How to sound more expressive when reading out loud

Welcome to the Influency Podcast. I'm Hadar and this is episode number 417. And today we're going to talk about how to read out loud without sounding like a robot. Hey everyone, what is up? Thank you so much for being here with me today. And today I'm gonna address a painful topic and I think this topic is relevant for speakers of English as a second language, but also it's relevant for you in your first language when it comes to reading out loud. Because I don't know about you, but for many, many years, when I would try to read out loud, it would always sound a little robotic. And when I listen to my students or when they talk about their challenges, it always comes down to having a difficulty of sounding natural and effortless when reading out loud.

Now why is that?

Why do we sound so different when we read a text than when we speak naturally?

Well, this episode is all about that.

Now, even if you're not interested in improving your reading, I really want to urge you to listen to this episode because I'm going to be sharing a bunch of strategies that are going to help you with your intonation, rhythm, stress, and sounding expressive overall, even when speaking, not just when reading out loud. So whether you want to improve how you read out loud and sound more natural, or maybe you just want to sound more natural when speaking, this episode is a must listen for you. So I hope you enjoyed this one. If you do, please make sure to come on over to Instagram and say hi to me. I'm Hadar Out Accents Way and let me know what you thought about the episode.

All right, good.

So let's go ahead and listen to today's episode. After five years of living in Japan.

And focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge. Do you sound like a robot when you read out loud? If the answer is yes, then this video is for you. Because today we are going to talk about why we sound robotic when we read out loud. Especially a text we are not familiar with, especially if we read in English, if English is your second language. And also, I'm going to give you five tips on how to improve your reading out loud so you sound more expressive and more like yourself when speaking. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Hadar. I'm a non native speaker of English and I'm here to help you speak English with clarity, confidence and freedom. Today I'm going to teach you something that is really useful, not just for reading out loud, even though that's pretty good in and of itself. But also because practicing reading out loud in a more natural way, a way that sounds like how you would speak, will help you improve your intonation, rhythm, stress, and overall self expression when you speak in English. So that is the purpose of today. Now, even if you think to yourself, wait, Hadar. But I never read out loud. I want to tell you that reading out loud is a really great way to practice your English and improve your fluency because you develop confidence in your voice and you improve your pronunciation and understanding of how to deliver ideas. So I think it's a really great practice method. And like I said, it's also going to help you sound more expressive when reading and when speaking. All right, so let's get started. Why do we sound robotic when we read out loud? First, it's because we don't know what we're about to read. For the most part when we read out loud and it's the first time we read it, or we have read it once or twice before and sometimes we don't remember exactly what we're about to say. So unlike reading out loud, when you're speaking, you know where you're going, so you're thinking about it and you're speaking your thoughts. And this is why it sounds more natural and organized. And also we speak the way we think. And sometimes we take breaks, we take pauses, we. We are thinking about what we're about to say and that makes it sound more natural. When we're reading out loud, we always know what we're about to say. So as a result, it will sound a little less natural. But there are ways to make it sound more natural and I'm going to share that with you soon. Another reason is, like I said, when we are thinking and speaking, then we group out thoughts and a thought is delivered together. And usually we take small pauses between thoughts and ideas. And when we end saying something important, an idea, then we usually take a pause. Now, when we're reading, usually we begin at the beginning and end at the end. And we don't take into consideration punctuation or if we do, it's not very natural. So we don't take into consideration commas and and full stops. And as a result, you don't take pauses, you read at the same pace, and you don't play with your intonation like you would if you were to speak it. Another reason why you may sound robotic is because intonation tends to be really repetitive. That might sound something like this. After five years of living in Japan and Focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge, so I moved to New York. You get what I'm saying? What does that mean? It means that sometimes you may have like a musical pattern in how you read. That could be something from your first language, or maybe this is just how you read it out loud because it may happen to us in our first language as well. And you just repeat it again and again. So that repetitive pattern is something that is going to make it sound robotic. And, and lastly, and I think it's kind of connected to the other two things that I mentioned is because there is no emotion when we speak, usually we speak with some kind of emotion or attitude, or you can hear what we think about what we're saying by hearing our voice. And when we're reading, it's kind of like flat, and that makes it sound robotic as well. So we do want to charge our voice with more emotion, and that's how it's going to sound more expressive. Now, remember, all of the things that I'm teaching you here today are relevant for speaking as well. But it's easier to start applying it in reading out loud so that you can improve your reading, but also, as a byproduct, you'll improve your speaking. So first, when you read out loud, plan for the punctuation marks. What does that mean? When you read? Always look for the next comma, the next full stop, the next colon, the next quotation marks, because these are indications of how you should break down your text. A comma is a short break, a full stop or a period at the end is a longer break. After a colon, you might want to take a small break before quotation marks. You might want to take a break. So you see how that works. You want to take that into consideration into your breathing, into how you read it out loud. And that alone is going to make a huge difference. Also, it's going to give you some time to organize your brain and organize your yourself and catch your breath if you need to.

To give you an example of what that looks like, I'm going to use this text. It's from a TED Talk called How drawing can set you free. And this is a small part of the TED Talk. So let's say I start reading. Before I start reading, I want to detect the punctuation marks. So there is a comma here and a full stop here. So I'm going to start reading and I'm going to try to keep my voice going and connect as much as I can, everything together until the comma. And then I know that I have a small break here, so I'm kind of, like, planning my breath, and I see that the comma is not very, very close to the beginning, so I might take a deeper breath. After five years of living in Japan and focusing on my craft, now I can take a break. I felt like I needed a new challenge. So when there is a period, I know that I'm going to take a longer break. And then I take a quick look at the next sentence, and then I see there is a quick comma here, and then another one here and a question mark. So as I'm about to start the next sentence, I already know that I'm going to have, like, two quick break breaks. Maybe I'm not going to take a breath there, but I'm going to take a mini pause. So I moved to New York because that's what you do as an artist, right?

All right, so that is tip number one. Tip number two is be aware of the melody of the language. It doesn't have to sound supernatural, but as you read out loud, try to recognize if you're repeating the same pattern again and again. If you are, remember that you have full control of your pitch simply by using your voice.

Play a game.

Imagine like you're reading a story to a little child, right? So there are no inhibitions. You will give yourself permission to exaggerate a bit. So do that when you're reading out loud, especially if you're doing it while practicing and there's no one around. And see how expressive you can get with your voice. And when you do, remember that you want to make sure that there is versatility in how you use your voice. It's really just like music. If you were to hear the same musical pattern again and again and again in a song, it would be kind of boring. That's the same when we're speaking. And doing it while you're reading is going to help you improve your speaking and make you sound less monotonous and more interesting.

All right, so now let's try practice technique number two. Using the same text, I'm going to exaggerate my intonation, and I'm going to try to make sure that it's not repetitive. Let me show you what that means. After five years of living in Japan and focusing on my craft, see how I exaggerated it. Craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge. Now, it's okay if it doesn't sound natural, but you're just exploring your voice. So I moved to New York because that's what you do as an artist. Right? Now, if you want, you can do it the second time and see what that does to your speech and your intonation. After five years of living Japan and focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge, so I moved to New York. Because that's what you do as an artist, right now I can do it in a different way. After five years of living in Japan and five focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge, so I moved to New York. Because that's what you do as an artist. Right. The idea is to really practice different things using your voice, as long as it's not repetitive and you're not using the same melody again and again.

Tip number three is play with your pace. I'm talking about the overall pace of the paragraph. Because when we're speaking, we're not speaking in the same pace all the time. Sometimes we speak a little slower when. Especially when we're trying to make a point. And sometimes we speak faster when we need to fill someone in on some information or when we get to the less interesting parts or the less important parts. So when you read out loud, you also want to notice when you can go a little further faster, and when you can go a little slower. New ideas and new information is usually set in a slower pace. When you notice that you rephrase something or when there is a clause that explains a previous clause, this is where you can go faster.

All right, so now let's play with the pace. Let's say that the beginning is going to be a little faster, and then the second part of the sentence could be a little slower. Where I get to my point, let's try. After five years of living in Japan and focusing on my craft, now I want to start slowing down. I felt like I needed a new challenge. Now I'm going back to my story, so I'm going to go a little faster. So I moved to New York because that's what you do as an artist. Right? I'm going to slow down a bit. You move to the greatest city in the world that has the ability to make you feel completely and utterly invisible. And I really slowed down on the words that I want to stress. Completely and utterly invisible. This is when I began to truly ask myself. So here I went a little faster to get to the main part. Who are you? This is when I began to truly ask myself, who are you? Now, there isn't a right way or wrong way to play with your pace as long as you keep it varied and interesting and you move between a little faster to a little slower, especially when you want to stress a certain part.

The next thing is to charge your words with emotion. So try to recognize ahead of time, again, especially if you had time to read it, if this is something that is cheerful or that you maybe want to engage your listeners, or maybe it's something that is more informative, or maybe it's a scene and there are jokes there, or maybe it's dramatic. So try to think about how you would sound if you were happy or if you were afraid or if you were just trying to be very certain in how you say things and see what that would do to your voice, and try to infuse that emotion into your voice. Because sometimes when we are happier or when something good happens, our voice tends to be a little lighter, a little more airy or breathy, maybe higher in pitch, right? And sometimes when we're really, really straight to the point, matter of fact, very certain, we tend to go a little lower, drop the pitch at the end all the time. So notice what happens to your voice when you feel different emotions and when you have different attitudes. And try to put some of that emotion into what you're reading, depending on the text or the. Depending on your attitude or intention while reading it.

So now we're going to charge our voice with emotion. And I usually like to do it after I have somewhat of an idea what I'm reading and what the intention of the person speaking is.

Or when I see words that are.

Big words, strong words, I call them operative words, words that have meaning. And then I slow down on these words, and I try to use my voice to express my attitude or feelings about this word or about what I'm saying. So let's see what that looks like. After five years of living in Japan and focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge, right? It's kind of like, okay, so there is this need here. How can I convey with my voice that I need something new? I felt like I needed a new challenge. Now back to casual. So I moved to New York because that's what you do as an artist, right? It's kind of like funny, sarcastic. You move to the greatest city in the world. So now I'm trying to show appreciation to. To the city. How would you show appreciation with your voice? Try it with me. You move to the greatest city in the world that has that ability to make you feel completely and utterly invisible. So you have to have an opinion about what that means, is it good? Is it bad? I believe that the character is saying that from her own perspective as something that is good. And this is why the feeling that I try to convey with my voice is a positive one. There is no right way or wrong way of doing it. It's really how you feel about it. But the most important thing is that have clarity around what you're saying and see what that does to your voice, to your emotions, and ultimately to how you read it.

The last thing to improve your reading out loud is of course, practice regularly. One of the best methods to practice is to read out loud while recording yourself, to listen back to it, give yourself feedback and try again. Always works and it's a win win. You both get to practice and to do it many times, but you also get to listen to yourself and to improve by doing that. Another great way to practice is to practice scenes or monologues, things that tend to get you more engaged emotionally. So you can do it on your own. You can practice with your spouse, speaking partner, or your friend or your spouse or your children. So practicing out loud, scenes, dialogues, monologues, something fun is a really, really, really good strategy to improve. All right, so first of all, good job for your practice. If you did the practice, even if you just listened, it's okay. But try to do this practice. And second, I'm really curious to hear is if it helped you sound more expressive and natural when reading out loud. So let me know in the comments please. And if you found it useful, then keep on practicing. And remember that it's not just for the sake of getting better at reading out loud, even though it's a great skill to have. This work also helps you become more expressive and natural in speaking daily in your first language and any foreign language that you might speak. Okay? All right. If you enjoyed this video, please consider sharing and liking and subscribing. And also if you want more lessons every single week delivered to your inbox, go to hadarshamesh.com and sign up for my email newsletter. There's also a ton of content waiting for you there for free. All right, everyone have a beautiful, beautiful rest of the day. Thank you so much for practicing practicing with me today and I'll see you next week in the next video. Bye.