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so you've written a script for your podcast and you write that script like you always do

you record it and you listen to it back and you just don't recognize what you hear you

are hearing some kind of like robotic sounding playback maybe like someone reading a textbook

and if that kind of thing happens that's how an episode can fall flat because it sounds like an

essay being read aloud and doing that kind of thing which is actually what you're probably doing

it can really break the connection or even break the trust that you might have established or

you're beginning to establish with your audience. Or it might cause your audience to just move on

to the next recommended video on YouTube or the next podcast episode in their queue. The way that

you use your voice is really important when you record your podcast episodes. But this has a lot

to do with the podcast scripting process as well. Welcome to the Podcast Performance Lab. I'm your

host, Jen deHaan, and in this show, we take the most effective tools from unscripted improvised

performance and behavioral psychology and apply those things directly to your video and audio

content. Now, when you're trained to write, you're probably kind of trained to sound like an expert,

or that's what your industry generally does, but you probably haven't been trained to write in the

specific way that human brains can best listen or comprehend the things that you're saying.

And they're really looking for just that really natural way that people talk in real life when

they go and listen to a podcast episode. So first of all, we're going to look at the science of

why this even happens, because understanding why this kind of cognitive mismatch occurs is really

important to understand so you can figure out the best fix for you and why any of this is even going

to help you at all. So a listener's brain is actively assessing your state and the intentions

that you might have through vocal cues that you're making.

And research has shown that a monotonous flat voice,

which is the one that kind of lacks variety and musicality and tone and expressions,

the ups and the downs and the volume changes or the cadence changes,

human perceive that kind of delivery as like a deficiency in communication.

Most humans usually don't think of a monotonous voice as like a stylistic choice, unless maybe

you're acting or doing some kind of character. Because those dynamics, those ups and downs and

everything, they help people learn and they help people understand you, among many other things.

So I'll link to some of that research about monotonous voice and perception of it in the

show notes and the description. So the robotic or that really artificial quality reading a script,

especially if you're new to reading scripts, that can cause a disengagement in your listener because

it goes against the brain's expectation of that sort of natural human vocal modulation that we have

when we're just talking between people, right? So it ends up being uncanny valley for them, but in the

audio part in this case. So the vocal cues are also really important for that perception of

authority or credibility on a subject because that vocal, all those vocal modulations like the changes

in pitch and tone and pace and volume, it really conveys socially confidence, like social confidence

and authority on the topic. Also, there's research around the speech rate, like how fast you speak and

how faster, like slightly faster speech rates tend to convey greater knowledge and expertise.

So it's much easier to support your vocal dynamics in the scripting process before you

even start talking to begin with. So the first step on this is to dictate your notes. A lot of

people, they don't write the way they talk. This is completely normal. Not everyone. There's

exceptions because all of our brains are wired differently, of course, or you might have worked

on this specifically in the past. You have all those reps, all that practice on it. But if this

concept is new to you and you're used to writing essays and that's kind of what you're doing for

your show, you can switch it up from typing your scripts to dictating them instead, speaking them

out loud. Now, why would you even want to do this? Educators and business people, like business

leaders, the experts out there, are highly trained in writing. It's what you've probably done for

decades. I mean, literacy is important. We practice this as a skill that we build up,

and you've probably spent a long time learning to write all of those complex sentence structures,

long sentence, long words, but these are the things that we write, and they aren't necessarily

just how we talk on a day-to-day basis. For example, I'm not gonna write gonna in a written

article, but I am going to use it in my podcast like I did just there. And I use it quite a bit

according to the transcriptions. So when this formal or written language is spoken aloud,

your essay that you wrote, or even maybe your newsletter, you go to an article on the internet,

whatever it is, and you read it for your podcast. It creates what researchers call

a modality mismatch. And modality mismatch means that the listener's brain, your audience, is

wired for the rules of an oral system. So it's perceiving this spoken literate thing as unnatural.

It's overly complex, and then it just comes across as kind of robotic or artificial because of that

modality mismatch. So that reaction is what triggers a negative perception of your podcast

episode. That's what these researchers are talking about. So the fix for this is to start approaching

your episodes, that first step, with a voice-to-text tool, any of them. There's a whole bunch of them

out there. You can just dictate out your core ideas, what you want to put into that episode,

and you can use them to just dictate out your core ideas,

whatever you want to put into that episode.

And there's a ton of options out there.

If you don't use one already,

one that I've used is called Whisper Notes.

There's Whisper Flow.

There's Mac Whisper.

That's my favorite one.

That's the one I use the most.

You can get all of those tools for iOS and macOS.

There's ones that have offline only modes

and a lot of privacy features as well.

Like if you're worried about that.

and you probably should be with how all these things are going. Now there's some that are built

for voice transcription that are really focused on accuracy and efficiency. So a few more that you

might want to check out if you're new to these apps is Google Keep and Notion. Those are both

free options out there just to do plain old voice note taking. There's one called Willow Voice,

there's Otter AI, there's Granola AI. They're built specifically for transcribing voice.

So that accuracy and efficiency is their priority.

But the free plans on all of those are fairly robust.

So they'll probably be enough for your podcasting.

But I'll most often just open up my to-do app, which is called Things.

And I'll just dictate out my ideas, just start talking.

And those are the notes that I use just to start the structure of my episodes.

What I do is like the very first round of a new script.

So check out what you might already have on your phone or your computer,

and it very well might be sufficient for what you need.

So if you use this way to start your episodes,

you're more guaranteed to actually sound like yourself from the start.

You're sounding like a human using this kind of system,

just as long as you don't go and over-edit yourself later on.

So now that you have this file of human spoken notes already,

your natural speaking voice, that's what you're starting with. Then you can start forming your

script and lightly editing it from there. And those are the next steps.

So the second step of the system is to make a draft that's like a signpost draft. That's kind

of what I call it. So you have this draft of notes so far in your natural voice, and you're going to

refine those notes for your listener so it's easier for them to understand where they are located in

your episode. You're going to add that particular information to your draft. So these signposts.

Signposts are called discourse markers in academia sometimes. So a study on this particular thing,

discourse markers or signposts, are that humans comprehend their lectures better,

learning humans, when the discourse markers were included in those lectures. So you can add that

particular learning from the research to your podcast episodes to help your listener out.

and that's because these signposts in the lectures signal the structure of that information.

They do things like tell the listener what's relevant to them

and that helps the listener remember what you said.

So for example, they can go tell a friend what you said,

like tell a friend to go listen to it, maybe.

So that was a signpost right there if you heard it.

But seriously, it helps those students in the lectures remember their lectures better.

And this is partly due to what's called the cognitive load theory.

That's also in research and papers.

And that just means that the human working memory is pretty limited.

It has all these bottlenecks in it.

For instance, they can only hold, human brains can only hold,

like five to seven pieces of information for a short period of time.

So if they're tasked with like listening to an hour-long episode that has a lot of information in it, it's really, really dense,

the comprehension and the retention of your listener can then fail because you're overloading their working memory.

So these signposts help with that.

If you have like a wall of ear text, you're going to hit your listener's overload and that episode is going to fail.

So this is you helping with that thing.

So this part of the system, adding signposts, it deals with it.

And you're going to just tell your audience what to do to help their active working memory.

So this part of the process, your draft, you're adding new ideas, you're emphasizing science,

you're adding scientific support, say, to your notes.

And then you're also going to tell your listener what's coming next in the transitions in your

podcast structure. So between each section of learning, you might be adding summaries and you

might be telling your audience what's coming up. What do they need to know next? You could also be

telling them why is this information relevant to them? Or maybe you're thinking something right now.

You're going to be adding these sorts of things to your transition.

Like one example is like, I'll get to this other thing in a second,

but first you need to know this thing for it to make sense.

You're basically getting inside your listener's head,

but hopefully in a fairly good way.

So the third step of this process, step three,

is where you're going to format your script for performance.

You have a script, it's in your human voice,

You've added those signposts so your listener can understand the information better.

But before you start recording, you're going to format it for you, the performer.

You're going to format your script for reading and performing into a microphone or a camera.

So remember that wall of audio or text, I think I called it ear text.

If you're reading a script that's like this, you're using all of your cognitive resources

in the moment already because you're reading and you're decoding what you're reading while

you're reading it, while you're performing as well.

You might be thinking about your voice, where your mouth is in relation to the microphone,

your vocal dynamics, or if you're recording on a camera, you're trying to figure out if

you're still in the frame or you're hot on the mic. So with all of these things, you're also

trying to read your script or your notes. And the way that you format them can actually offload a

lot of this cognitive burden that you have on yourself. So you're going to be adding things like

notes or square brackets about your performance or what you need to remember, like add a little

story about this thing right here if you're going off script. Or you might add some bold face or

italics for words that you want to emphasize or say slowly. All of this stuff can become delivery

cues for you in the moment. And then those cues are going to reduce your cognitive load for your

performance. So that frees up your brain to focus on things like, I don't know, sound and human.

So you want to use spacing too that can help you scan and process the text really clearly.

You want to break long sentences into new lines for pauses or add notes for it,

like in square brackets, for example.

You want to use bold and italics for your anchor words.

These are the important words that will help you remember things to add emphasis

or add those stories, for example.

So while you can get reps to help with your voice, like the musicality and the cadence and all that other good stuff, the way that you form your scripts for a solo show will make a huge difference in your recording.

And it's going to give you a lot of that vocal element, all that good stuff for free.

So by using this kind of process, you're going to use dictation into a voice-to-text type tool

like WhisperMac to really match the way you speak as a human.

And that's going to connect with the user a lot better.

Then you're going to use some signposts to really just guide your audience

and reduce their cognitive load while they're listening to your episode.

And finally, you're going to format your script to reduce your cognitive load.

so you can perform it a lot more naturally, a lot more human.

So I hope this will help you with your podcast,

and I'll be back soon for the next episode.

Bye for now.

You have been listening to the Podcast Performance Lab.

This show is created, written, hosted, edited, and produced by Jen deHaan.

You can also find the video version of this episode on YouTube

and contact information on StereoForest.

Find the links for both of those things in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.