One casualty of our era’s obsession with innovation and youth is the fading away of great and evergreen lore from yesteryear’s advisors. Dorothy Sarnoff, still alive today at age 94, was for much of her life a font of frankly-stated good sense about how to speak in public. I’ve never met her, but I sure do wish I had. Her writings have helped me immeasurably, helping me address groups, control stage fright, and get to the point. Her books are largely out of print today, but well worth reading (if you can get past the dated references to such things as TV newscaster Chet Huntley). Try to get hold of Never Be Nervous Again if you can find it.
Ms. Sarnoff, trained on the theatrical stage, advised everyone from Jimmy Carter (whom she helped with his 1980 State of the Union address) to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In between these celebrities, she coached legions of Ogilvy & Mather executives on how to speak. More importantly, she taught them how to comport themselves with dignity and poise, with the voice as her central focus. She also ran her own highly successful presentation coaching firm for decades.
Most of all, Sarnoff wrote with mordant, dry wit and memorable metaphor. Here are some of my favorite Sarnoff quotes, still so relevant to speakers today even as we meet more and more via Facebook instead of face to face:
"A woman once told me proudly, "My friends say my voice is so soothing that it puts them to sleep." The poor creature thought she was being complimented. Her friends were really trying to tell her that she was failing to keep them awake."
"You cannot be lovable at first listen if you talk through your nose. You will be whining, lifeless, and negative. Yet your voice has to come out through your nose if your mouth does not open enough when you talk. Look into your mirror, and say, "Hi, you handsome, wonderful, lovable creature!" There should be almost a half-inch strip of darkness between your teeth throughout a good part of that self-admiring sentence."
"ARE YOU THERE? (Lack of projection: the whisperer, the fader).Do you usually sound weary and depressed? Does your voice have wrinkles in it? Does it lack vitality, vigor, energy, enthusiasm, and intensity? Are you constantly asked to repeat because people do not hear you? The reason may be that you lack proper breath support. You are failing to project.
Whispering is for telling secrets and making love. There is only one time when you are justified in whispering in public. That is when you stand at the altar, and say, "I do." Even if nobody can hear you, everybody will know what you said."
"A not too distant relative of the whisper speaker is the fader. His voice comes and goes as if he were a crystal radio in a thunderstorm. A sentence may start perfectly well, on a flowing current of breath support through which the words swim as gracefully as fishes; but toward the end the current dries up, leaving the last words to expire, flapping a little, on the wet sand. Just when the sound should be strongest, it collapses like a fallen soufflé.
Beware the unprojected voice if your purpose is to communicate. The only person the overquiet speaker can communicate with effectively is a professional lip reader."
"The flock of a parish priest complained, 'Six days a week he is invisible, and on the seventh he is inaudible.' He was a mumbler."
"The average voice runs a scale of twelve to twenty notes. (A professional actor's or singer's may span thirty-six.) Some unfortunates have a speaking range of only five notes. If you are one of these, your voice has all the fascination of a faucet with a worn-out washer-you drip, drip, drip. Or, like a metronome, you tick, tick, and tick. As you doze, other doze. You are a Johnny or Jenny One-Note.
Businessmen sometimes come to me with complaints like this: "When I talk, people get a sort of glazed, sleepy look." Why wouldn't they, if they have to listen to that endless drip, drip, drip, tick, tick, tick? Even the hundred eyes of Argos, the monster of Greek legend, could not have stayed open. No variety of pitch. No color. Drab, drab, drab."
"DO YOU UPSTAGE YOURSELF? (Visual distractors) Fidgeting; frowning; raising the eyebrows; nose twitching; lifting the one side of the mouth; pulling the ear or chin; biting the lips; fussing with hair, beads, pencil, fingers or tie; swinging a leg-these are only a few of the common distractors which may be upstaging what you are trying to say."
"If you are single, your speech may decide whether you will ever marry. If you are married, it may decide whether you stay that way.
A still-handsome woman sobbed to me that after thirty-five years of marriage her husband was insisting on divorce. There was no other woman, he assured her; he simply wanted to be alone.
Whatever else may have been wrong with that marriage, one handicap leaped to the ear. If I had lived with her convulsive giggle and mosquito-like voice for years, I would have wanted to be alone too.
It was not difficult to clear up the giggle. Unfortunately, it was too late to clear up the marriage.
So if your husband winces when you speak, or your wife never seems to listen to what you have to say, you could do worse than to take a look at your own speech."
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