How to articulate your thoughts smoothly and clearly?

When you speak to an audience, whether a product, a service, or even an idea, the value of effective and efficient communication is unmatched. In order to convey your message, you need to have some degree of control over the language with a rich vocabulary of words and phrases. Clear expressions and proper gestures can do wonders for your cause. However, if the audience does not understand what you are saying or misses a few words or phrases, your message will not be understood at all, no matter how interesting your presentation may be. Often, it is said that a lost message is a lost business or an opportunity to establish a strong business relationship. Therefore, advocacy is an hour-long necessity in today’s business world, to ensure you successfully achieve your goals and objectives by establishing formal and informal relationships.

Errors which we make while speaking

Articulation, simply put, is one’s way of pronouncing words or producing sounds. Some of the prominent types of errors we make while speaking are:

• Substitution: In this type of error, one sound is replicated for another sound. 

For example’s’ is substituted by ‘th’, and hence, ‘soap’ becomes ‘thoap’

• Omission: In this type of error, a sound in a word is omitted.

For example, ‘brown’ becomes ‘bown’

• Distortion: In this type of error, a word is pronounced in an unfamiliar way. 

For example, you might want to say, ‘sun’ but end up saying ‘son’

• Addition: In this type of error, an additional sound is inserted inside the word. 

For example, ‘back-bone’ becomes ‘black-bone’

Other common mistakes while articulating our thoughts

A person may make a mistake in using the wrong tone of voice, speech, or language in order to convey his message. You need to have a different tone, tone of voice, and language of different categories of people you communicate with on a daily basis. For example, while using a strong tone may be acceptable when talking to your supervisor, using the same when talking to your senior or client is not well received. Therefore, we need to understand who we are talking to and choose the right tones, expressions and language, in order to avoid making this kind of mistake.

Another common mistake we sometimes make is that we often do not distinguish between the language used in the leadership role and the language used instead of non-leadership. The language used in the leadership role will not be silent, difficult or ambiguous. Sometimes, we end up using words or phrases like, “what’s going on?” in our communication with leadership. While it is good to use such language in our lives, it may not be acceptable in your interactions with stakeholders.

How to have proper articulation?

To improve articulation and to have an error-free conversation, because even the best-spoken person can have articulation problems at it, we need to:

Observe:  

We need to watch and listen to how others speak. We can start by assessing how they speak, their expressions, their body language, their approach with different sets of people, how they form their sentence,s or how they pronounce the words they speak.

Reflect:

After observing a group of people, think about why they did certain things or why they chose certain words and how their attitudes and communication methods changed when they were conversing with different people. Also, meditate on yourself. How you would behave in the same situation, how you would pronounce certain words, etc., and then try to come up with a strategy or things you would like to use in your daily conversations.

Listen to yourself:

One of the most effective ways of overcoming the problems of articulation caused by mispronunciation or mumbling, softly speaking, using too many filler words, or abruptly blacking out while speaking, is to listen to yourself speak and identify the areas you would like to work upon and improve and work on the same.

Pronunciation and choice of words:

It is not necessary to use fancy words all the time as the simple language with a clear thought process and meaning tends to be more effective in getting your message across. At the same time, it is important to pronounce each and every word clearly and to avoid making any of the four errors mentioned earlier. To improve your knowledge of the pronunciation of certain words, you can take the help of Google or YouTube where the correct pronunciation is easily available.

Practice:

“Practice makes a man perfect. ” This saying is also true here. Practice as much as you can in your troubled areas, whether in front of a mirror or with family and friends. You can also watch English movies and listen to songs, to better understand the language and its unique pronunciation.

Think before you speak:

If you are asked a question or asked to speak on a particular topic, pause for a bit before speaking, gather your thoughts, be sure of what you want to speak and then start speaking. This will help you in avoiding awkward pauses, using fillers or mumbling because you are not sure of what you want to speak.

Businesses are built on relationships. To promote and maintain good relationships with the various members of the organization, you need to be an effective coordinator. One of the keys to being a good communicator is being a good communicator, as it is very important for someone else to clearly understand what you want to convey. Observe, exercise and meditate as often as you can and in an instant, you will be one of the most defined people in the room.