You have articles sitting on your website. Hours of work, buried in your archives. Turning them into audio seems simple enough. Just hit record and read, right?
That approach sounds awful. I tried it.
Writing for the eye and writing for the ear require completely different structures. Sentences that look elegant on the page come out robotic when spoken. Or you stumble. Or you sound like you’re reading (because you… are).
In this episode, I walk through the translation process that turns a written post into something you can actually perform. It takes about fifteen minutes per article and makes all the difference.
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Transcript
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::Reading your blog post word for word into a microphone is almost certainly a mistake.
::I tried doing this and when I did, it sounded monotonous, kind of breathless at times.
::It was just really painful to listen to.
::Now, writing for the eye, for reading your content, is very different than writing for the ears to hear it.
::Now, you probably are writing really nice and complex sentences that look and sound great when
::they're read, but they really fall apart if you try to speak them into a microphone or onto the
::camera lens, because you are doing things like running out of breath or stumbling. It sounds
::like you're reading. So if you have to translate something from your writing to be read, you need
::to write that thing to be heard by the ear. So to do this, print out your blog post and read it aloud
::at least once just to hear it. Now every place that you stumble because the sentence is weird or it's
::not a natural word that you would use when you're speaking, cross it out and write something
::simpler. Or just make a note about that section, what it's about, because you might just want to
::speak about it instead of read about it. Every place that you run out of breath because the
::sentence is really long or complex, break that sentence into two. I also, when I do this, I add
::cues for myself like little notes, pause or slow down. I might use boldface or italics to emphasize
::something or you can underline it if it's on paper. This only takes 10-15 minutes per blog post,
::assuming it's not too long. And then you have a script you can use and actually perform on a
::podcast or in a video. These blog posts that you have have already captured what you want to say,
::your expertise, what's right for your business.
::This last step is just kind of translating it
::to make it sound like you for your show.
::I'm Jen DeHaan.
::This is the Credibility Minute.
::Find more episodes or get in touch with me
::and subscribe at stereoforest.com slash minute.
::Music