How an audience hears, sees, and interacts with you changes in a webinar, webcast, or virtual classroom (relative to an in-person environment), and two separate 1080 Group studies have found that how you use your voice is more important to virtual audiences.

So what’s your secret weapon in turning your vocal delivery into a fount of mellifluous awesomesauce?

Practice reading aloud for meaning-making.

Practice

You don’t have to be a professional speaker to be a professional who speaks well.

Bonus points: Record it and listen back.

Reading aloud

Stretch yourself by reading material that is not something that you’ve written.

Bonus points: Mix up the types of content you read. Recommended: A news story, a feature story in a magazine, a children’s story, and poetry or song lyrics.

Meaning-making

Diction, inflection, volume, pace, and pauses are all well and good. But you can do all those things and miss turning the building blocks into something that connects with both the head and the heart.

Bonus points: Read a passage more than once, shifting which words you emphasize and where you pause to explore nuances in changing the meaning of the passage.