Presentation Skills London & Brighton - voice coaching exercise Sonnet XVIII
Recite this sonnet regularly. There are exactly ten syllables per line. Remember what one of the original functions of a punctuation mark was? To tell us where to breathe…
Ten syllables and a breath will guide you toward a BBC newsreader pace of delivery. A pace that is very easy for just about everybody to assimilate easily. By regulating speech and breath it will also begin to have a calming effect not just on you but also on your listeners. Translate the sense of the sonnet pace into your everyday speech and into your presentation delivery. I’ll say a little bit about the interpretation and meaning of Sonnet XVIII in another post…
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
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