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Tips for Reading Aloud

A Christmas CarolOne might think that read­ing your own writ­ing aloud—to an audience—is a straight­for­ward, even sim­ple thing. In fact, it is not. The writer who taught me that was Charles Dick­ens.

I had known about Dick­ens’ pub­lic read­ings. They were, appar­ent­ly, famous­ly superb, and attract­ed huge audi­ences. But it was a chance vis­it to New York City’s famed Mor­gan Library which taught me how he pre­pared for such performances.

On dis­play was his read­ing script of A Christ­mas Car­ol, a work he often per­formed. It con­sist­ed of a pub­lished edi­tion of his book. But here was the rev­e­la­tion: he had altered the writ­ten text into a per­form­ing text.

He took out the “he saids” and “she saids”—because he could dif­fer­en­ti­ate char­ac­ter voic­es suf­fi­cient­ly with his voice. He cut parts of the expos­i­to­ry text where it went on too long. He cut text so as to inten­si­fy the action. He added text to help his audi­ence under­stand what was happening.

The key mes­sage was this: an audi­ence that LISTENS to text responds dif­fer­ent­ly than an indi­vid­ual READING text.

I sus­pect that most librar­i­ans and teachers—and even authors—who read text, even of their own com­po­si­tion, feel duty–bound to respect the text to the ulti­mate degree, shar­ing each and every word. Take it from Dick­ens: that’s not so.

Avi reading at book festival

Also, before I began to do readings—either solo per­for­mances, or with a group such as Authors Read­ers Theatre—I took voice lessons. I found a class called “Voice for Actors.” Won­der­ful­ly help­ful. Among oth­er things I learned:

How to stand.

How to pitch your voice so as to max­i­mize emo­tion­al value.

How to pace one­self, not just as a per­former, but so an audi­ence can absorb what you are saying.

How to alter the voice for dif­fer­ent characters.

The Read-Aloud HandbookI has­ten to say this is all about method­ol­o­gy, not any par­tic­u­lar skill.

Final­ly, con­sult a good ref­er­ence such as The Read Aloud Hand­book by Jim Tre­lease. Such a guide under­stands that some books read aloud bet­ter than others.

I promise that if you con­sid­er all of this, and do it, you can ful­ly engage your audi­ence with reading.

6 thoughts on “Tips for Reading Aloud”

  1. Good stuff, Avi. I advise all authors who do school vis­its to take voice lessons. Know­ing how to project your voice ( and PROTECT you voice) makes doing the vis­its much more enjoyable!

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  2. I could con­sid­er myself a “pro­fes­sion­al” read aloud-er. I was a teacher for 41 years and still sub. I devel­oped the skill over time. I lis­ten to poets doing read­ing. Adult read­ers to adult audi­ences are some­times too dry for my tastes, but for chil­dren and for a per­for­mance to cap­ti­vate the read­ers, well, all you say is so impor­tant. And the way we write and how it is read aloud does dif­fer. Jim Tre­lease’s book is a great resource. Thanks for this. I would love to see the Charles Dick­ens read­ing script.

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  3. Great ideas! Read­ing with dif­fer­ent voic­es for each char­ac­ter is effec­tive and also enter­tain­ing for adults who can look glazed over by authors who just open and read with­out con­sid­er­ing that the audi­ence some­times has no idea of how the sto­ry relates to their lives.

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  4. From the NYPL:

    “Charles Dick­ens could not only write a crack­ling good sto­ry, he could per­form it. And so in 1853, he took his Christ­mas Car­ol show on the road, first in Britain and then in the Unit­ed States. Audi­ences loved it. Dick­ens did­n’t sim­ply read from his book. He trans­formed it into a stage­wor­thy script—cutting, past­ing togeth­er pages of excised pas­sages, adding stage cues for him­self, rewrit­ing, then cut­ting some more.

    Such an anno­tat­ed stage copy is called a prompt copy. There is only one such copy of A Christ­mas Car­ol, cre­at­ed by Dick­ens him­self, and The New York Pub­lic Library has it. Lev­enger part­nered with the Library to bring you, for the first time, a full-col­or fac­sim­i­le of it, reveal­ing all of Dick­en­s’s hand­writ­ten mark­ings. A new intro­duc­tion by Library cura­tor Isaac Gewirtz gives the back­sto­ry on how Dick­ens used this book, and a tran­scrip­tion of his emend­ed text means you—or a show­man you love—can read aloud A Christ­mas Car­ol much as the author did. It’s a rare Christ­mas trea­sure and a new way to savor this time­less tale.

    224 pages, full-col­or fac­sim­i­le. Pub­lished by Lev­enger Press, 2009.

    Hard­cov­er. $48.00. ISBN 978–1‑929154–39‑5.”

    Reply
    • Ah, thanks for this, Avi. I was pret­ty sure I had remem­bered see­ing a fac­sim­i­le copy of the read­ing script. Good to know where to find it!

      Reply
  5. Lis­ten­ing to NPR’s Select­ed Shorts read by pro­fes­sion­al actors, I became aware of how much bet­ter some are at it than oth­ers. All these actors do great work with movie dia­logue, but read­ing sto­ries is a spe­cial skill as well.
    Even more so for writers.

    Reply

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