On Delivery

Several thoughts/ideas occurred to me while reading this chapter on Delivery. When I was in high school and college I was very involved in the campus TV station. In high school I did the morning announcements and in college I anchored our campus news and sports shows. Also during college, I worked as a on-air personality at a local radio station. I was always aware and conscious of my delivery so I definitely understood this chapter.

When I was on TV, I relied on teleprompters and scripts to give the news. When I had to do voice overs during clips, I would often rely on the script as written by the reporter who created the individual stories. Due to deadlines, reporters would often just sloppily write their voice over and hand it in to our director who would hurriedly hand it to me while I was miking up. There were a few instances where coincidence would have it that I didn't skim over the script beforehand and the reporter made grammatical or punctuation errors. If I was in the middle of a story and a period was misplaced (or missing entirely) or some other indicator of a pause was missing, my entire flow would be thrown off and it would cause me to either have to re-read the entire sentence or just trudge along without acknowledging the mistake.

I eventually learned my lesson after a few mishaps. I would usually read the script the whole way through, marking punctuation in my own style along the way.

The same was true when I worked in radio. The station where I worked did lots of contests and so the sales team would require the DJs to make announcements about the contests and of course to mention the advertisers. Our programming staff trusted the sales staff to enter in our 10-15 second on-air readings. I knew for sure that I would have to re-write these myself with my own punctuation and pause indicators as the sales staff would just write the way they thought it should sound (which of course was always boring-sounding).

Another example of delivery from when I worked in radio. When I first started at this Top 40 station, I had come from working in a news setting where the tone tended to be a little more professional and serious-sounding. My Program Director once told me that I sounded like an old man and that people would be bored by my on-air formality. He gave me a few examples of what he wanted me to sound like and told me that he knew I could do it, I just needed to relax (he thought I was too tense) and just pretend I was talking to a room full of people in their early 20s. I worked on my delivery (I did the whole stand up and smile while you talk technique), incorporated hand motions and just acted as if I was talking to a friend who was sitting in front of me. Within a few shifts, I improved greatly and it felt awesome!