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My STC Summit Proceedings paper on voiceover techniques (Voiceover)

Series: Voiceover techniques

by Tom Johnson on Apr 7, 2010
categories: screencasting

  1. 1.1 Finding a Conversational Voice in Video Tutorials
  2. 1.2 The Problem with Speaking Conversationally in Video Tutorials
  3. 1.3 Finding an acoustic environment (Voiceover)
  4. 1.4 Sounding natural (Voiceover)
  5. 1.5 Avoiding a sense of rambling (Voiceover)
  6. 1.6 Smiling while you narrate (Voiceover)
  7. 1.6 Avoiding plosives and breathing noises (Voiceover)
  8. 1.8 Avoiding phlegm in your throat with voiceovers (Voiceover)
  9. 1.9 Fixing Fumbled Sentences
  10. 2.0 Adding inflection (Voiceover)
  11. 2.1 Recording with the right microphone (Voiceover techniques)
  12. 2.2 Breathing correctly (Voiceover)
  13. 2.3 → My STC Summit Proceedings paper on voiceover techniques (Voiceover)
  14. 2.4 Podcast: Ten Voiceover Techniques (PodcampSLC)
  15. 2.5 The Perfect Voice -- Professional or Authentic?
  16. 2.6 Imperfect content and the difficulty of writing video scripts
  17. 2.7 Slides and recording for "Perfecting the audio narration in instructional video" at Info Dev World

When you present at the STC Summit, you're supposed to submit a proceedings paper describing your presentation. Given that only a fraction of my followers are members of the STC, and an even smaller fraction are attending the Summit, I'm providing my proceedings paper here: "Developing a Personal Voiceover in Audio" (PDF). (It's allowed under the STC copyright agreement.)

As you know, I wrote about this topic at length on my blog through a series of posts on voiceover techniques. I had about 10,000 words overall throughout the posts. In this proceedings paper, I mostly used the material from these blog posts, but I reduced the length in half. I also implemented some of the feedback from the comments (thank you, by the way).

It turns out that consolidating individual blog posts into a longer essay works well, as I was able to condense it all in just a few hours. Based on this experience, I'm going to write more series posts. Look for an announcement about my upcoming series tomorrow.

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About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.

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