Speaking With Skill: A Skills Based Approach to Speech Training

Front Cover
A&C Black, Sep 30, 2012 - Performing Arts - 326 pages


Dudley Knight is one of the most respected voice and speech teachers in North America and highly regarded internationally. Janet Madelle Feindel - Associate Professor of Voice and Alexander, Carnegie Mellon University.

Speaking with Skill marks a fundamental change in the pedagogy of speech training for actors and speakers. It presents a skills-based approach to speech training and offers a wider range of techniques and a more integrated approach to speech actions and phonetic transcription than are found in other speech texts for theatre.

Speaking with Skill reintegrates speech training with the allied fields of linguistics and voice science and represents the first serious reexamination of the archaic standards and pedagogy that have dominated speech training for actors and other professional speakers in America. The method employed in this book is already and increasingly being used by instructors on major actor training programs in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the UK.

 

Contents

Silence
3
The space that shapes sound
11
From silence to sound
21
the tool kit
35
Phthong shaping
65
obstructing the flow
71
Outlandish
79
The physical actions of obstruents in language
85
American vowel phonemes
179
New vowels for diphthongs
185
All the vowel phonemes
193
Combinations
199
Polysyllabic words
213
Connected speech
221
Formal and informal speech
237
Consonant skills
253

The empty obstruent chart
94
a daily articulation warmup
111
Writing it down
119
Sound to word
155
Writing the vowels
165
Vowel skills
279
Putting it all together
295
Index
321
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About the author (2012)

Dudley Knight is Professor Emeritus of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He has had an extensive stage career that includes major roles in regional theatres along with hundreds of roles in film, television, radio, and voice-over. He is certified as master teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework and has enjoyed a 40 year career as voice, speech, text, and dialect teacher and voice/text director for professional theatre. He conducts workshops and lectures on voice and speech for actors and voice teachers nationwide and is Currently Editor-in-Chief of Voice and Speech Review.

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