The Dangling Conversation...

December 17th, 2001

One of the most frequently heard directives from news directors or producers is that they want their reporters and anchors to sound “conversational.” This has always made me just a little bit crazy, since I am just as conversational when I am bored and tired as when I’m yelling at the cable company to fix my reception. It’s all conversational.

The problem with the idea of conversational is that it isn’t very exact. Over the years, when you discuss the issue with those same news directors and producers, what comes out is that they want somehow for the words coming out of the mouth of their reporters and anchors to sound as if they were their own words and thoughts, and most specifically not sound like they are being read.

For those of us who study performance theory, the concept is described more like “there is an emotional connection between the words being spoken and the person speaking them.”

Maybe a better term, more descriptive in its vagueness would be that the reporter or anchor should sound “natural.”

Now the weird thing about this is that what we have to do is work very hard to recreate under the most stressful and artificial conditions imaginable something that we do everyday instinctively. The very process of being self conscious affects the performance, usually for the worse.

This concept of being natural, or conversational is tantalizing, since it appears so easy for someone who is good at it, and yet the moment you become self aware, your performance can quickly sound stilted and artificial. It’s like thinking about not thinking about how you talk. How do you do this?

In the next couple of installments, we’ll look at some exercises that make this conversational quality a bit easier to understand and much easier to use.

In the meantime, keep breathing!