When does a polished speaker become slick? 

I ask this question because I occasionally see so-called “professional speakers” behaving in peculiar ways.  They have developed a presentation “style” that doesn’t seem natural, that smacks of late night infomercials and snake oil charlatans. 

What they do would get them fired in most corporations, not because of what they say, but because of what their style says about them.

First, let’s define the terms.  Polished means at ease, organized, and skilled at structuring and delivering a talk.

Slick means gimmicky, schticky, schmaltzy, overdone, histrionic, overly theatrical, manipulative, and insincere.

A polished speaker does not let his desire to impress overwhelm his obligation to provide something of value to the audience.

A slick speaker has a routine that he uses to dazzle his audience, and seems more interested in wowing than connecting.

I’m not saying that style is unimportant.  But the style of a speaker should suit the topic and the occasion.  A style that draws attention to itself, or is out of sync with the content, undermines the credibility of the speaker and creates a gap between speaker and audience.

Most of us live at a safe distance from the polished to slick border line.  But as we get more skilled and confident, let us beware of the danger. 

Audiences crave intimacy with a speaker.  Slickness turns them off.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

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Typical voice and speech training issues include:

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• vocal fatigue
• too many “ers” and “uhms”
• an accent that makes the speaker hard to understand

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1. First, we record & identify the voice or speech challenge.
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When bacon fries, it makes a crackling, bubbling, splashy sound and smells delicious.

When young women fry their voices, they make a grinding sound in the back of their throats, and regardless of how they smell, they are undermining their stature and impact by doing so. 

I am going to call the Center for Disease Control to announce that I have detected a dangerous new epidemic of The Vocal Fry. (Please see the bottom of this posting for a definition of Vocal Fry.)

It has mostly infected young women, and it makes them sound as if they’ve run out of air, and are generating their voices by grinding their vocal chords together.

It manifests itself mostly at the ends of sentences. To me, it makes them sound tense, cerebral, and unappealing. I do not want to listen to them speak about anything.

No doubt this is a failing on my part, but I am confessing now, in public, that The Vocal Fry is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

I think it’s mostly educated young women, maybe even educated young women from a certain background that have developed this as a fashionable way to talk.

I am going to capture recordings of it and put them up here on the blog, or on my other blogs at www.simswyeth.com/blog or at executivespeechcoachny.com

The human voice must stand guard over the content of a spoken message, or the content will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.

The Vocal Fry has to go.

Definition:The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealisation, pulse phonation, creak, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape or strohbass), is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.