0487 – 11 - Contractions and Elisions

2022.05.02 – 0487 – 11 - Contractions and Elisions

11 - Contractions and Elisions

Ensure you have natural conversational contractions in your delivery: “they’ll”, “couldn’t” and (if appropriate for your programme or podcast) “coz”, “wanna”. (Obviously check with a director for ‘signed off’ scripts that you can make these kinds of changes.)

We saw earlier how elision makes a read sound more natural. That is, the slight running on of words into one another, with a less choppy presentation that comes with sounding, each, individual, word. In English, we often don’t say a word exactly as it is spelt, because we want to sound natural and fluent for a way to make your read conversational, ‘every-day-of-the-week’ kind of read.

For instance, look back at that previous sentence:

·        Not everyone pronounces the ‘t’ in “often” (and say “offen” instead).

·        Hardly anyone would say “exactly” with a clear ‘t’’, but smooth it out to say “exacly”

·        We are likely to say “nd” or “n” rather than “and” (how do you really say “fish and chips”? I bet it’s close to “fishnchips”?

·        “For a” is often said “frer”

·        “Your” could be changed to “yer”

·        “Every” is said “evry”

·        “Day of” would become “day’ve”, “kind of” changes to “kind’ve”

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