You Needn't Keep The Voice You Hate

   Many of us hate our voices. Too soft, too little-girl-sounding. But we think there's nothing we can do about it.
   Not true, says Sandra McKnight, who is conducting a workshop called "Change Your Voice, Change Your Life" from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., July 29, at the Albuquerque Petroleum Club, 500 Marquette Ave. NW.
   "Most of us just adopted the voice we heard one of our parents use," McKnight says. "In some cases, we started speaking very softly because Mom was an alcoholic and wanted everything very quiet.
   "On some level, people realize it's not their voice — on a technical level and on a 'who-am-I' level. It doesn't feel like the right voice."
   McKnight, a voice teacher and actress (you may have seen her as Nora Phillips

on "General Hospital"), says a motivated person can change her voice in six or seven sessions. The workshop is a start and can make an immediate difference; often small group classes develop afterward.
   "The voice is the megaphone of the soul," says McKnight. "The way you sound at any given time is who people think you are. When you have control of your voice, you have the power to control the impression you create.
   McKnight speaks from experience. At her first audition, when she was trying to break into acting, the director barked at her: "Miss McKnight, please come down off the stage." She did, and he said, "If you want to work in this business, get rid of that voice."
   She burst into tears, but the director told her not to worry, just to go find a

voice teacher at Julliard in New York. She worked seriously on changing her voice and successfully got rid of what she called her nasal, Pittsburgh accent.
   McKnight started teaching voice to actors in Los Angeles about 10 years ago and was soon asked by some businesses to work with their telemarketers. When sales took off because of improvements in voice and speech techniques, the word quickly spread. Since moving to New Mexico, McKnight has worked with such businesses as Intel, US West, the University of New Mexico President's Office, as well as individual clients.
   The cost of McKnight's workshop is $150 and includes a catered lunch. To register, call 466-6500 or e-mail .
                          — Polly Summar

Featured in
The New Mexican Home Page
October 25, 2000 Eldorado Edition Page 5

Teacher helps students gain respect changing their voices

By MICKEY ROGERS
For The New Mexican

   Do you have an IQ of 150 but just can't seem to get any respect?
   Eldorado's Sandra McKnight of Voice Power Studios suggests changing your voice. McKnight teaches seminars and workshops nationally to business executives and other professionals who want to improve their ability to communicate and control the impression they make on others.
   She has an impressive client list, including The University of New Mexico, the U. S. Coast Guard, Sprint, Public Service Company of New Mexico and the American Telemarketing Association.
   McKnight explained that success in life depends on how you present yourself through appearance, actions and sound. Your ability to communicate has a profound effect on how others perceive you, she said.
   "It's not just what you say, it's how you say it," McKnight said. "Your voice can convey many things: self-assurance, persuasiveness and trust-worthiness. And those things contribute to one's success in life. For example, if you have a weak or nasal voice, or a tendency to speak too quickly or to mumble, you cannot expect to have the same impact as someone who imparts a clear, confident and authoritative image."
   This was certainly the case in her own experience. A native of Pittsburgh, Penn., McKnight experienced her first taste of rejection while auditioning for an off-Broadway role in New York City.
   "A director told me that I had talent, but my voice was too nasal," she said. "Like most people I didn't realize how I sounded."
   After studying voice at Juilliard in New York, McKnight moved to Los Angeles and spent many years as a successful actress in Hollywood. She appeared in over 200 commercials and made several appearances on various soap operas and television shows. Her most notable role was as Nora Phillips on General Hospital.
   About 14 years ago, McKnight began to sense a decline in roles for women who were no longer in their 20s and 30s. A friend suggested she start a voice class for actors. She expanded her prowess by studying body language and communication and developed a series of seminars and workshops for professionals as well as lay people. Eventually, she broke into the business


Jane E. Phillips/The New Mexican Sandra McKnight of Voice Power Studios teaches workshops to professionals who want to change their speaking voices.

world, created a business named Your Voice Via the Telephone and began training telemarketers.
   Corporate accounts followed and despite her move to Santa Fe, her business continued to thrive. In New Mexico, her services have been employed by Los Alamos Laboratory, Intel, the New Mexico State Department of Taxation and Revenue, the New Mexico Association of Counties, First National Bank of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Properties.
   "Communication is 55 percent body language, 35 percent voice and only 10 percent words," McKnight said. "When companies are vying for contracts the person who best presents themselves has the leading edge. But the same is true in social situations. You attract others according to what you project."
   McKnight teaches several different workshops. Change your Voice, Change your Life is a popular course scheduled quarterly at the Santa Fe Community College. It includes instruction on articulation: speaking more clearly and distinctly, putting power in your voice, building skills for effective presentations, projecting confidence and a rich, authoritative voice and increasing vocal flexibility and making your voice come alive.
   On Nov. 15, Your Voice is Power in the Business World, another seminar, will be held at the Petroleum Club in Albuquerque. It includes a professional voice analysis, role playing exercises to shape the impression you make, taking control of the non-verbal messages you

send, freeing yourself of vocal anxiety and learning to communicate more effectively.
   On Nov. 16, McKnight will hold a seminar at the Governor's Conference called The Theater of Life, inspired by Shakespeare's analogy, "all the world is a stage, and men and women are merely players." This seminar explains how to create a more dynamic presence in the workplace by using acting and improvisation techniques. McKnight uses costumes and props to demonstrate how people assume different images.
   "Acting gives you tools and teaches you skills," McKnight said. "Just as an actor develops a character on stage, in real life you can learn how to develop your own persona and project the image you want. You can develop a better sense of who you are and how to present yourself more effectively in different circumstances."
   McKnight also teaches Voice Production, a class which educates actors, broadcasters and T.V. personnel on the use and care of their voices. The next course will be held during the Spring semester at the Santa Fe Community College.
   She has also developed a one-woman show called Oops! That's Life! The show consists of a series of comic monologues common to all which she performs in whole or in part at luncheons and dinner events.
   For more information on Voice Power Studios call 466-6500 or visit the Voice Power Web site at www.voicepowerstudios.com.

Featured in
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February 3, 2004 Section D

The Campaign Against 'Like'

As Ex-Valley Girls (and Boys) Move Up the Ladder, Pressure Grows to Sound Professional

By ANDREA PETERSEN

   IN SUZANNE Loudamy's house, the word "like" is under siege.
   When her 18-year-old daughter, Sarah, speaks, Ms. Loudamy holds up her hands to count how often the word leaves her mouth.
   "My mom talks about how it's not, like, professional and says I'll look stupid," says Sarah Loudamy. "But someday everybody my age will be in the professional world with me. If they're saying 'like' too, I won't stand out." Two decades after the song "Valley Girl" popularized it, a fresh effort is afoot to stamp out this linguistic quirk. The generation that grew up saying "like" is hitting adulthood and the work force. As a result, it is now in the lexicon of investment bankers, doctors and even teachers, where it can sound especially jarring. "I'm sure I say, 'like' a lot," says Liza Sutherland, 28, a sixth-grade humanities teacher in New York. "I don't worry so much about how my students speak."
   Like a verbal virus, this usage is also increasingly spreading to other English-speaking countries. British and Canadian kids now grease their sentences with the word. Sali Tagliamonte, professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto who has researched the speech of the elderly in the United Kingdom, found that they, too, have a surprising fondness for "like." "If I showed you a written document of the conversation, you would think they were young women in North America, not 78-year-old ladies from Scotland," she says.
   The battle, of course, isn't being waged against traditional uses of "like" — the ones that express an affinity ("Mikey Likes It") or compare two things ("My love is like a red, red rose"). What's targeted is the repetition of "like" that to critics sounds like nonsense. Example: "Like my mother is like a total space cadet." (From the lyrics to "Valley Girl.")
   Linguists say "like" has a growing number of meanings. It can act as a "hedge," to tell the listener that what is being said is an approximation or an exaggeration. (Example: "She has, like, a gazillion shoes.") It can also be a "focuser," to declare that the next bit of information is important. ("He is, like, so hot.") One of its most ubiquitous uses is as a substitute for "said." ("So my mom was like, 'Do your homework.' And then I was like, 'I did it at school.'")
   There is a range of tactics to combat all this. Some parents

Sandra McKnight in the Wall Street Journal

mimic their kids and "like" them right back. Fed-up English teachers are turning their classrooms into "like"-free zones. Even speech pathologists are being called in to help break the habit, at rates of as much as $100 an hour. One common tactic: tape recording or videotaping the afflicted as a kind of shock therapy to show them how "like"-infused they really are.
   In one exercise at Leap Learning Systems, a language school in Chicago that offers after-school and summer programs to help inner-city kids master "standard business English," students are asked to shout "beep beep" whenever a speaker in the class uses "like," among other words, unnecessarily. Katie Schwartz, a speech pathologist in Chattanooga, Tenn., has a more Pavlovian technique. Her "Sense Cues" kit trains speakers to associate the smell of something they don't like with remembering to delete superfluous "likes" from their conversation.
   When the "likes" start spilling from the mouths of Vickie Bunting's students, she writes their sentences on the blackboard and has them read the words back. "It will click and they'll see it doesn't mean anything," says Ms. Bunting, who teaches high-school English in Lubbock, Texas.
   Language watchers offer various theories to explain the spread of "like." Some blame declining emphasis on grammar instruction in schools. Others point to an explosion of slang in music and movies, making nontraditional speech more widespread and acceptable.
   Defenders of the practice argue that these usages are just a natural evolution of the English language. Indeed, even some linguists say the word can be downright useful. When dropped into the middle of a sentence, for example, it gives the speaker time to gather his thoughts so he doesn't say the first (sometimes insipid) thing that comes to mind. Studies also show that people who have learned not to use filler words are interrupted more often, and tend to use simpler sentences.

   "It really is a wonderful, useful word," says Muffy E.A.Siegel, an associate professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia, who has studied the use of "like."
   Valley Girls weren't the first group to find some other uses for "like." Jazz musicians and beat poets used it as a filler word in the 1950s — as a substitute for 'um' — according to linguists. In the late '70s in Southern California, the word for the first time started turning up, in popular form, to introduce a thought or bit of speech.
   This form of "like" was unveiled to

Like 'really is a wonderful, useful word,' says one professor of English.

youth culture with the song "Valley Girl" by Frank Zappa and his then-13-year-old daughter Moon Unit. A decade later, "like" with a form of the verb "to be" was voted the phrase "most likely to succeed" by the American Dialect Society, a group that studies American English.
   And succeed it has, judging by the frequency with which it still pops up in conversations. In a University of Alberta study, which involved 30 Americans ranging in age from 14 to 69, a couple of the participants used the word more than 100 times in a half-hour conversation. The study found that, while younger people used it more often, all age groups employed the Valley-girl-type "like."
   Indeed, while the stereotypical offender may be a 15-year-old suburban girl who twirls her hair and works at the mall, some studies show that boys are now just as likely to abuse the word.
   Some of the "like"-dependent just end up reaching a compromise of sorts. Justin Slay, a 15-year-old in Lubbock, Texas, says whether or not he uses it depends on whom he is with. "Girls say it in almost every sentence," Justin says. "I don't say it when I'm talking to guys."

Featured in
The Wall Street Journal Home Page
February 3, 2004 Section D

A Personal Trainer for Your Voice

By JENNIFER SARANOW

   VINYA LYNCH HATES the sound of her voice. She thinks it is timid and sing-songy. She blames it for why she is frequently cut off giving presentations at work, and for why it takes her as many as 10 tries to record a voice-mail message.
   "When I listen to myself, it doesn't sound intelligent," says Ms. Lynch, a 35-year-old handbag designer.
   So last summer, simply to change how she sounds, Ms. Lynch began seeing a speech pathologist. Total cost: $2,250 for 10-sessions plus evaluation, text and tapes. "I want my voice to be charismatic and confident all at the same time," she says.
   Speech therapy used to be for stutterers, lispers and other people with medically diagnosed language problems. But in a culture increasingly devoted to personal trainers, self-help books and cosmetic surgery, a new outlet for self-betterment is emerging: the personal voice trainer.
   Eager to boost their prospects professionally or socially (or both), a growing number of people are hiring speech pathologists to "tone" and improve normal voices. It's a phenomenon driven partly by the tight job market, where every little advantage counts, as well as the pervasiveness of cellphones and voice mail, which can amplify the eternal tendency to cringe at the sound of one's own words.
   "This is not speech therapy, this is beautification of the voice," says Ita Olsen, a speech pathologist in New York whose firm Oslic Consultants LLC sees about 275 individuals a week for "cosmetic" voicechanging, compared with about one per week three years ago.
   Technological advances are making cosmetic voice changes easier. A number of speech-therapy practices are using digital video endoscopy, a technology that allows speech pathologists to see the vocal folds as they are vibrating — and to home in on what the talker is doing wrong. (It involves sticking a small fiber-optic tube with a camera at the end up the patient's nose.) Others use a computerized system that quantifies speech. Patients speak into a microphone and a line appears on a computer screen that reflects their pitch, loudness and vocal quality. The number provides a quantitative baseline voice from which doctors can work.
   But speech therapists are also finding low-tech ways to capitalize on the growing

market. Sandra McKnight, a voice coach in Santa Fe, N.M., offers voice training over the phone (a typical treatment program is four 75-minute phone sessions for $640). She says she doesn't have to see patients in person to know what their voice problems are; she just needs to hear them. Susan Miller, a Washington, D.C., speech pathologist, and Susan Berkley, a voice expert in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., recently released a compact disc package, available through the Internet (www.voicetrainer.com), called "Vocal Vitality: A safe, easy warm up program to energize and enhance your speaking voice" with morning vocal exercises for unsatisfied talkers. They've sold several hundred so far.
   Dr. Miller says the growing demand for voice improvement became apparent to her in the fall of 2002 when she gave a six-week course at the Smithsonian called "Cultivating the Medium of the Message: Your Voice." She expected about 30 participants at the first class. More than 150 showed up. "I was shocked," says Dr. Miller, who estimates about 35% of her 120-patient-a-week practice now is devoted to training normal voices, up from 5% three years ago.
   People have been wincing when they hear themselves speak since the dawn of the recording. Common complaints run the familiar litany of too high-pitched, too monotone, too nasal, too much like the opposite sex. For women, they often include: too shrill, too "valley girl," or too faint. For men, familiar grievances are too gravelly or too weak.
   Voice experts say that many voice "problems" are caused by unbalanced talking, or using too much of one part of the voice. (The components of the voice include breathing, vocal chord vibration and the sound of the voice as it resonates out of the mouth, nose and throat.) For example, hypernasality results from letting sound resonate too much through the nose. A gravelly or harsh tone comes from excessive tension in the throat area.
   The voice "is very similar conceptually to a person's knee," says Joseph Stemple, a speech pathologist at the Blaine Block Institute for Vocal Analysis and Rehabilitation in Dayton, Ohio, and author of a well-known voice pathology textbook. "It can become strained and weakened and unbalanced and you can do direct exercise to enhance it."
   The key behind most voice exercise programs is teaching patients to find their "true" sound when emphasis isn't on

one part of the voice over others. Patients learn to breathe from their stomach and let the voice carry more fully out of their mouth. They learn to feel whether they are exerting their mouth, nose or throat too much when talking. They use relaxing exercises to relieve tension that may be putting emphasis too much on one area.
   Patients say that the end result is a better voice and more-effortless talking — but getting there takes a lot of work. Learning to talk with a "true" voice can mean anything from figuring out how to hold your tongue while speaking to breathing differently — movements that feel weird and unnatural at first. It takes extensive practice to turn such changes into habit.
   "The results are largely dependent on the amount of energy that they are willing to put into their practice," says Kate DeVore, a speech pathologist from Chicago, who estimates that personal training of normal voices now accounts for about half of her practice.
   It requires not only practice, but a substantial amount of money, usually between $100 and $200 per session. Group sessions, which Dr. Olsen in New York has dubbed "voice spas," cost less.
   Ms. Lynch says the gain has been worth the pain. At her third session with Dr. Olsen this past summer, Ms. Lynch relaxed her head from side to side, took a few breaths and practiced saying phrases she utters daily such as "40th and Broadway" and "two tickets please" using her new "true" voice.
   A few weeks ago, she finished the last of her 10 sessions. Her new sound is deeper, slower and stronger than her regular voice, thanks to relaxing her throat muscles more to let air out and figuring out how to use her tongue differently.
   "I learned a lot in theory and now, it's just a matter of applying it," she says. For now, she's mostly practicing around strangers — when she orders coffee, for instance, or gets in a taxi. But one day at work, she decided to use her new voice — or as she prefers to call it, her "natural voice" — all day. Everyone asked, "'Why are you speaking that way?'"

— The Wall Street Journal Online