Articulation Made Simple

by Kimani Upshur, M.Ed.

Speak Clearly, Be Understood the First Time, and Say It With Confidence Somewhere in your life there is a sentence you have said more than once: “No — what I said was…” Being misunderstood is rarely a knowledge problem. Most people who are hard to understand know exactly what they mean; the failure happens in the last eighteen inches of the journey — between a clear thought and a listener’s ear. Articulation Made Simple is the companion to Public Speaking Made Simple, working one level down: at the level of the single word and the single sentence. Articulation is the physical act of shaping breath into finished sounds, at a pace a listener can follow — a skill of the body that responds to training at any age. This book takes the machine apart chapter by chapter: breath, the engine under every word; enunciation and finished consonants; the dropped endings that carry English’s plurals, past tenses, and the whole difference between “can” and “can’t”; pace and the pause; killing the mumble in every condition; drills and tongue twisters used properly; reading aloud well; the room, the microphone, and the phone; a ten-minute daily practice routine; and confidence built the durable way — through competence. Includes a one-week drill plan, an error-journal method for finding your own leading fault from your own recordings, and a benchmark-page system that measures your progress in evidence instead of feelings. Written from a Christian worldview — Scripture first.