Plosives
The tongue is a muscle. Like any other muscle in the body it can be trained to become stronger and to move around the formation of sounds accurately and quickly. A lazy tongue means that your speech will sound lazy. The audience may struggle to understand what you are saying, especially if you’re speaking quickly. It’s not just the tongue that is important in effective articulation; your lips also have a large part to play in sounding letters.
Plosives are sounds like ‘buh’ and ‘puh’ (B and P). They’re called this because they make an explosive sound when forced from the lips. It’s important that your lips are strong for your plosives to be clear. If they’re weak, your words won’t fly out into the auditorium with sufficient force or energy to make an impact.
The Joshua Steele rhythm exercise
This is an excellent exercise for improving articulation and can be used for plosives and other consonants to stop them becoming weak or ‘splashy’. Sound out a consonant in accordance with the rhythm below. /// indicates a silent beat or rest.
Try this with other consonants, such as d, s, g and v. You can do this with any letter. Focus on keeping the sound clear, crisp and precise. When you’ve mastered it, try to speed up and maintain good articulation. When you use the exercise with plosive sounds, try it voiced and unvoiced. ‘Voiced’ means that you push breath over the sound as if you were speaking it. ‘Unvoiced’ means that you don’t use any breath but let the mechanics of the mouth movements you make create the sound.
