Express Yourself Clearly - 3 Speech Secrets to Help You Land Your Dream Job

The Straits Times, Singapore's leading English newspaper, published one of my articles today. Here is the full text if you missed it.

If you want to land that dream job, work on the way that you speak. Interviews are formal settings where you will be judged in many areas, and if you can’t express yourself clearly and confidently, you can kiss that job goodbye.

When you attend an interview, everything you do and say is being noticed, recorded and judged. From your clothes and shoes to your body language and speech, you must be polished.

When you answer questions and share your talents with your interviewer, keep these three speech secrets in mind to ensure that you make a long-lasting impression that sets you apart from the rest.

Speech Training: Say WHAT? How to pronounce the word "what"

Last week a participant in my Speak up Successfully course asked me a very good question: "How do you pronounce the word, 'what'?" He was under the impression that it should be pronounced hwuht with an h in front.

As an American in Singapore I can sometimes be too quick to answer pronunciation questions by explaining how I personally pronounce things. This isn't always fair because Singaporeans have been taught British pronunciation which can be quite different.

I answered his question by saying, "No. There should not be an h sound before the w in what." Like a good student, he went home after the course and checked the online dictionaries I listed in the resource section of his workbook. The next morning there was a mail in my inbox:

"Remember, i asked you how to pronounce WHAT..

dictionary.com says: '/ʰwʌt, ʰwɒt, wʌt, wɒt; unstressed ʰwət, wət/
Show Spelled Pronunciation: [hwuht, hwot, wuht, wot; unstressed hwuht, wuht]'

hwuht means that there's a 'h' in it?"

Hmmm... This is a tricky one.

First of all, it is important to note that several pronunciations are acceptable. Depending on where you are in the world, you may hear people pronounce what with or without what looks like an h sound in front.

My original answer, that there shouldn't be an h was correct for my own variety of English, but wasn't entirely accurate for all varieties. At the same time, in order to really understand what the spelled pronunciation is calling an h sound, we need to go into slightly deeper phonetics.

The superscript h (called a diacritic in the phonetic alphabet) means pre-aspiration. Aspiration refers to your breath, so what that means is that the w sounds slightly ‘breathy’ (for lack of a better non-technical word).

When we breathe out, the closest real sound we make is the h sound which is why it is transcribed as hw in the spelled pronunciation (a slight downfall of spelled pronunciations, in my opinion). This sound is very slight in most varieties of English and I would not classify it as a pure h.

Try putting your hand up in front of your mouth while you make the p sound. You should feel an explosion of air on your hand. This is aspiration. You are not really making the sounds p-h. Rather, your breath accompanies your pronunciation of the p.

The same is happening when you make the w sound, but the breath is coming slightly before the w. If you were to look at the visual imagery of a recording of someone saying what you would be able to see slight aspiration at the beginning of the word. I believe this would also be true of the way that I say it. I cannot however agree that the word starts with an h.

Does that make any sense? What do you think? How do you say WHAT in your variety of English?

Speech Training: What is "correct" pronunciation?

What is correct pronunciation? I've asked myself this question so many times while designing my programs, and participants in my programs ask it even more.

Yesterday, I received 938LIVE's English@Work e-newsletter (938LIVE is a talk-radio station here in Singapore that supports the "Speak Good English" campaign). They were also asking this question and their answer was "any pronunciation used by careful speakers and recorded in dictionaries, like the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary." At face value, this seems like a pretty decent definition - if you happen to come from the US (lucky me!) or UK; the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary only covers the most common and acceptable pronunciations for these two countries.

What the dictionary doesn't cover are all of the absolutely acceptable regional variations of the English language. What about Australian English accents? And what about here in Singapore? Is there a Singaporean dictionary that outlines the correct pronunciation for the English spoken here? Adam Brown, David Deterding and Low Ee Ling (among others) have done fantastic research into the Singapore English Dialect, and have recorded many of the pronunciation rules for this variety. Yes, there are "rules" that people generally follow here. Are we to say that since these rules aren't recorded in a formal dictionary, they are "wrong?"

When people ask me what "correct" pronunciation is, I continue to have the same answer: it depends. It depends on where you are in the world, who you are speaking with and where that person comes from. Pronunciation is learned by listening to the people around you. You copy what you hear. So if your teachers pronounced the word success as "sus-sess," that's probably the way you pronounce it. Just as I pronounce the same word as "suk-sess" because that's how people around me pronounced it. Is one better or more "correct" than the other? Not in their relative regions. My American accent is no more correct here in Singapore than the Singaporean accent would be in America.

The current debates about pronunciation arise because our world is becoming increasingly small. When we speak across borders our regional varieties begin to cross and suddenly there are misunderstandings. We all need to work to speak slowly and clearly. We need to articulate our words from start to finish (see my earlier post on word endings), sharpen our consonants and get serious about our speech instead of lazily mumbling through our conversations. It wouldn't hurt to learn some of the differences in vocabulary in different parts of the world too.

What we don't all need to do is adopt an American or British accent. What a boring world that would be to listen to!

Related references:
938LIVE English @ Work newsletter:
http://938live.sg/MCR/938Live/Common/Channel%20Info/eNewsletter/English@Work/Issue119(6August).htm
Books:
Brown, Singapore English in a Nutshell (my personal favorite on SG English)
Low & Brown, English in Singapore: An Introduction
David Deterding, Singapore English