5: The Intelligibility Series

This series is about how to improve your intelligibility. In the bad old days, this used to be called things like “clarity” or “diction”, and often focused on certain styles of speech for the actor, which were, essentially, accents that were perceived to be high status, and non-regional. Think Received Pronunciation (RP) in Great Britain and Stage Standard aka Good Speech for the American Stage in the US. Today, it’s more about choices an actor can make to help the audience understand him or her, to hear the detail in their speech so that they can appreciate the specific words the actor is saying. You should probably start with my post What is Intelligibility?

I didn’t create these posts as a series with a sequential order, and they’re not meant as a warm-up. But many of the posts have exercises built into them that you could include in an advanced warm-up. I’ll list them here as bullet points. This is in reverse chronological order, so perhaps you might want to start at the bottom of the list…

• Give Me Excess of It: Post-vocalic Continuants
• Lighten Your Dark R
• Lighten Your Dark L
• Consonant Cluster -sts
• Releasing Your Final Consonants
• Balancing Consonants and Vowels
• The Emphasis Recipe
• Strong Forms and Weak Forms
• Over-Articulation
• The Mumble Method

As I write more about Intelligibility, I’ll continue to add material to this list.