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You've written a script for your solo podcast and you're writing that solo podcast like you always do.

And then you record that episode and you end up sounding kind of like a bot.

Like a bot maybe reading a textbook.

If that happens, that's kind of how an episode can fall flat.

It sounds like an essay being read aloud and doing that can really kind of break the connection

or even break the trust that you have between you and that audience of yours.

Or at least it might cause your audience to just move on to the next recommended video in their playlist

or the next podcast episode.

The way that you use your voice is really important when you record an episode.

But it has a lot to do with the scripting process too.

You've been trained probably at some point in your life to write like an expert.

But you probably haven't been trained to write in the specific way that a human brain can best listen or comprehend what you say.

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

This is the Solo Podcasting Handbook.

Hi, I'm Jen deHaan and in this episode I'm going to show you a system that I use for my shows here at StereoForrest

where I focus entirely on solo podcasting and essays like this.

How I end up writing scripts that sound, I hope, as human as possible.

So before we get to that system that I use here at StereoForrest,

we're going to look at the science of why this 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 this is 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 one that kind of lacks variety and tone

and expression like the ups and downs and volume or the changes in cadence,

humans perceive that kind of delivery as really a deficiency in communication.

So they usually don't think of a monotonous voice as like a stylistic choice unless you're acting or something or doing a 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 in the description.

So the robotic or that really artificial quality from reading a script,

especially if you're new to doing so, that can cause a disengagement.

Because it goes against the brain's expectation of sort of that natural human vocal modulation that we have when we're just talking between people, right?

It ends up being uncanny valley for them, but for audio in this case.

These 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 and authority on the topic.

There's research around the speech rate, like how fast you speak and faster, 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 start talking to begin with.

So the first step to work on this is to dictate your notes.

So a lot of people, they just don't write how they talk. This is 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 and you have reps on it.

But if this is you new to it and you are used to writing essays and that's kind of what you're doing for your show,

you can switch up from typing your scripts to instead dictating them, speaking them out.

Now, why would you want to do this?

Educators and business people, business leaders, the experts out there are highly trained in writing.

That's what we've done for decades.

Literacy is important. We've practiced it all, right?

And you've spent decades learning to write with all of these complex sentence structures,

maybe long sentences and words.

But these are the things that we write and they kind of aren't necessarily how we just talk in real life.

For example, I'm not going to write "gonna" in a written article that I put out there on the internet,

but I use it a lot in podcasts, apparently, according to the transcriptions.

So when this formal or written language is just spoken aloud, you go to an article you wrote on the internet

and read it for your podcast episode, it then creates what researchers sometimes called a modality mismatch.

And this means that the listener's brain is really wired for the rules of an oral system, right?

It's perceiving the spoken literate, right?

Like your medium essay that writerly text as unnatural and overly complex and kind of robotic as a result.

And so that reaction is what triggers that 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.

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

And there's a ton of options out there now.

If you don't use one already, some that I've used, whisper notes, whisper flow, Mac whisper.

And these are on both phones on iOS and Mac OS, if you're using a Mac.

There's ones that have offline only modes and a lot of privacy features.

And there's some that are built for that 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.

Google Keep and Notion.

Those are both free options out there for just voice note taking.

There's one called Willow Voice.

There's Otter AI.

There's Granola AI.

They'll also work for this.

They're built specifically for transcribing voice, so accuracy and efficiency.

But the free plans on those ones are fairly robust enough.

They might be enough for your podcasting.

But often, like if I'm not using something specific like Mac Whisperer,

I'll just open up my to-do app, which is Things or Notion,

and just turn on the dictate option and just start talking.

And I'll use those notes that I make in those apps just to start off a new script.

The very first round of it.

So check out what you might already have on your phone and see if that's sufficient for what you need.

But by using one of these voice-to-text tools like this,

you're really prevented from accessing that sort of over-learned,

literate system of yours.

You're typing brain.

And you're really forced to generate ideas that are just using your normal human speech.

So whatever that's like is best for your episode.

And you're pretty guaranteed to sound like yourself from the start

and like a human using this kind of system,

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

So this process, as long as you don't go do that,

is going to be capturing human phrasing and your human cadence

and simpler sentence structure.

And it's not like a trick or something like that.

You're just matching what you naturally say,

which is going to be what your listener's ear then expects.

Having these human-sounding notes will stop you from that rambling.

So your resulting episode is much more in a form that listener's brain

is designed to process fluently.

So now that you have this file of notes already

in your natural speaking voice to start off with,

then you can start forming your script and lightly editing it from there.

And those are the next steps.

So the second step is to do a draft that's like a signpost draft.

That's kind of what I call it.

So you have this draft, it's in your natural voice.

Now you're going to refine it for the listener.

So it's easier to understand where they are in your episode

and where you're going with that information.

So these signposts that you're adding into your script

are called discourse markers in academia.

So a study on this particular thing found that people comprehend

their lectures better, learners,

when the discourse markers were included in the lecture.

So this is some learning that you can bring to your podcast episodes

to help your listener out.

And this is because the signposts signal the structure of your episode.

And they do things like they tell your listener what's relevant to them.

And this helps them remember what you said in the episode

so you can tell a friend and get them to listen to.

See, that was the signpost right there, if you heard it.

But seriously, it helps students remember their lectures in university.

And this is called the cognitive load theory in the papers.

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

Like it has a lot of bottlenecks in it.

For instance, you can only hold about five to seven pieces of information

for a short period of time.

So if a task like listening to an hour long episode

that's informational and really, really dense,

the comprehension and retention of your listener can fail

because the working memory is just overloaded.

So you can help with that.

If you have like a wall of ear text,

you're going to hit your listener's overload and the episode fails.

So you can help with that, right?

This part of the system, this signposts part of the system,

it deals with that, it adds those signals.

So you can tell your audience what to do, basically.

It's going to help their active working memory.

And this is the stage where you're also going to add new ideas

or emphasis or science to support those notes.

You're going to tell them what's coming next in the transitions

between those sections and then add those summaries

of your human notes and these editions that you're making.

And while you're doing this, you're thinking like your audience,

what do they need to hear?

How is this communicated best in what order?

Now examples of these signposts are like,

the thing you want to take away here is or what this actually means

is this for your podcast, why is this relevant to you?

Or maybe you're thinking something worded right for you.

You also want to have those transitions.

Like I'll get to this in a second, but first you need to know this thing for this reason.

You're basically getting inside their head, but hopefully in a good way.

So the steps three is the performers formatting step of the process,

of your script writing process.

So you have a script, it's in your human voice.

We've added those signposts for the listeners

so they can understand the information better.

But before you're going to record, you're going to do this step.

You're going to format your script for reading and performing it

into a microphone or into a camera.

Now this formatting is also going to help you, the human performing it.

So remember that like wall of audio, wall of text,

I think I called it a wall of ear text.

So you're reading a script, you're using all of your cognitive resources in the moment.

You're reading, you're decoding what you're reading while you're reading it.

You're performing all at the same time.

You might be thinking about your voice, those vocal dynamics,

and if you're in the frame in the camera or if you're hot on the mic.

So with the way that you form your text to read it from those notes to a script

or whatever you're going to be using and reading from,

that formatting that you use can actually offload some of the cognitive burden for yourself.

So you're going to be adding things like notes and square brackets about your performance

or what you need to remember, like a little story that you're just going to tell that's not scripted

or you're going to add bold face or italics for emphasis.

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 your brain is just freed up to focus on sounding like you, like a human.

So you want to use spacing that helps you scan and process the text really quickly.

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,

those important words that help you remember things or to add emphasis on how you say things.

And you also want to add some notes to keep track of where you are or how you're going to perform it.

And I'm also working on some episodes about the ways that you can write your scripts

to really help with this using this kind of system in a lot more detail.

So make sure you're subscribed to the show or this channel, wherever you get it.

Or you can also go to StereoForrest.com, my website, sign up to the newsletter,

and I'll send you updates and also more resources on podcasting.

So while you can get reps to help with your voice, like the musicality and the cadence and all of that other good stuff,

the way that you form your scripts for a solo show will make a huge difference in your recording

and is also going to give you a lot of that vocal element stuff for free.

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

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 just really guide your audience and reduce their cognitive load

while they're listening to your episode.

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

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

So I hope this will help you with your solo podcast data and I'll be back soon for the next episode.

You can watch or listen to other episodes from this show in the meantime and it's available wherever you get your podcasts

or also on YouTube. Bye for now.

This episode was created, written, directed and hosted by Jen deHaan of StereoForest.com.

For more information about the show, episodes and to contact us, please visit StereoForest.com/SoloPodcasting.

Thanks for listening.

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