Ancient folks knew a thing or two about punctuation.
As a matter of fact, early writings were often in all uppercase and did not use punctuation at all. It wasn’t until this dude named Aristophanes (a librarian from Byzantium) invented a system of dots to indicate pauses of different lengths in the 3rd century BCE that any sort of punctuation existed at all.
Punctuation has a colorful history, from the virgula suspensiva (a slash) and the quaestio (question) or abbreviated into Qo (which eventually evolves into the ?) into what we now use as our modern means of the reading roadmap.
Yes, you read that correctly: Punctuation is the reader’s roadmap.
I’m gonna say something that may cause riots among the grammarians: Punctuation is intended solely for the reader’s benefit. The speaker, on the other hand, can and should use it as more of a suggestion or (here comes the riotous part) ignore it entirely.
Hear me out.
Let’s assume that the following text is some audition copy you just received. Your job as a voice actor is to examine the script, analyze the text, identify who the audience is, and give one or two takes based on the specs.
“To be, or not to be,
That
is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
And by opposing end
them. To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to:
’tis a consummation.”
First of all, how this bit of copy is laid out is…atrocious. Line breaks fall in weird places. The punctuation is clunky and let’s not even talk about the iambic pentameter.
But it’s the copy you were sent for a rather tasty audition so you crack open your DAW and start to analyze the text while you warm up, prepping to lay down a killer couple of takes.
As you look at the copy it seems that the first word must be stressed, the second two lines are bunched together with a colon and a comma thrown in there for some natural breaks; and then the 3rd line stands out by itself (gotta hit that a little different right?). And the closing lines are also sorta bunched together with the ubiquitous tag line isolated at the end so as to highlight the branding statement of the product.
Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy right?
No – in fact, wrong on almost all accounts.
What you don’t know is that the copywriter cut and pasted the text of the copy out of MS Word into a Google Doc and that made the formatting all wonky but it’s a rush job and, well, these are just the words they need to hear for the audition so it’s okay. Lazy on their part? Perhaps. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt because copywriting is a wholly different beast than voice acting.
The truth is that if you read the copy as it appears on your screen, then you are equally lazy and putting entirely too much trust in line breaks and punctuation. Feel free to write an angry letter to your third grade teacher for making such a big deal about periods, commas, and semicolons.
Let me say this again: punctuation is for the reader, not the listener.
Who really cares about an oxford comma?
“But I am the reader,” you protest. True, but you must also play the role of the listener – and in this case, if you read this copy the way it’s ‘written’ it’s gonna sound broken and poorly phrased and certainly not sound like it’s coming from the genuine you.
When it comes to punctuation, you’ve got to be your own sherpa and guide yourself through the jungle of commas, line breaks, periods, and em dashes. Did you know that there are two different lengths of dashes? Em and En? Oh yeah, it’s a whole thing in the punctuation world and one that could very well constitute a whole blog post in itself.
But, I digress.
Unless the specs say otherwise, you’re allowed to interpret line phrasing, emphasis, etc. as you see fit. Since the specs for most auditions nowadays say “conversational” and “non-announcery” I suggest you ignore the punctuation altogether because in normal everyday human speech…there is no punctuation.
Read that again: in normal everyday conversations, people don’t speak with punctuation. And you generally aren’t listening for punctuation.
So why would you care about using it in an audition? Cue the flashback to your third-grade teacher angrily wielding that yardstick while she accentuates the importance of the period to mark the ends of sentences.
Yes, you should acknowledge the punctuation but don’t let your read be dictated by it. Think of punctuation as a suggestion, not a mandate. It’s going to be hard, I know and you may have to practice with how you approach this new thinking. One thing I used to do with my actors when I directed stage productions was to have them rewrite their lines on index cards in all caps with no punctuation.
Oh the consternation that caused!
But it allowed them to memorize the lines and not speak to the punctuation which often resulted in more organic delivery of the words without the writer’s forced pauses, hard stops, and line breaks.
You most certainly could do that with your auditions, though that would be time consuming to have to re-write every piece of copy in all caps and without punctuation. But, try it one time with some copy you’ve already auditioned for and see what happens. Practice with several pieces of copy, removing the punctuation, and allowing yourself to just say the words as you would say them in a conversation.
Over time, you may find that you’re able to automatically ignore punctuation and speak the words as if they were your own and in an organic, conversational manner.
I will tell you that, though I used punctuation in the writing of this, when I put my voice to this blog post, I can guarantee that I won’t be paying attention to what my writer-self used to help readers navigate through these paragraphs because my voice actor self knows how to ignore punctuation.
Let me know if you try this approach to reading a piece of copy!
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