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Chapter 14: Public Speaking II

14.1 Thank a High School Teacher for Darth Vader

He was only five years old, an African American boy from Mississippi, when his father left town for work, and his mother left him in the custody of his grandparents. They lived in Michigan, and the trauma of that move from the deep south to the north was enough to give that boy a severe stutter, and he became functionally mute. He didn’t speak again until he was 14 years old. He says:

I resigned to it as a kid…. When I was approaching serious schoolwork, you had to really report what you knew, and the teacher accepted that I could do all my reporting with a pencil. I didn’t have to speak. Oral examinations? I did all mine written. And I became just a non-verbal person. I became a writer. And I was resigned to that.[1]

It was a high school teacher who finally coaxed the boy into reading his poetry in front of the class. He never fully overcame his stutter, but he learned to control it, and he joined the theater program. From there, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became an actor, eventually getting the part of one of the world’s most recognizable voices: Darth Vader. After that, he provided the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King, uttered the CNN taglines, and took on many other roles. Even when people could see his face on stage and in live action movies, the thing they seemed to respond to most strongly was his voice. So thank goodness that teacher convinced James Earl Jones to begin speaking again.

The voice is a powerful tool. Consider this: in today’s science fiction and fantasy movies, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on visual effects and the creation of magical creatures that the world has never seen before. But when it comes to providing a voice for one of those characters, what do they do to the actor’s voice? Usually nothing at all — sending the message that you can’t improve on the human voice. (The only thing you can do to it is make it creepy, so characters’ voices are occasionally modified, but even the apes in the Planet of the Apes series have normal human voices). Or think about the popularity of podcasts, which primarily consist of just people talking. In a book called The Human Voice, Anne Karpf writes “The voice is one of our most powerful instruments, lying at the heart of the communication process… It bridges our internal and external worlds, travelling from our most private recesses into the public domain. You can’t really know a person until you have heard them speak.”[2]

You may not like the sound of your voice,[3] or think that you’ll ever sound like James Earl Jones or Scarlett Johanssen, but this chapter is about developing that tool of your voice (and other body parts), and using it to bring to life that speech you wrote in the previous chapter. Just as a meal isn’t really a meal until it is eaten, a written speech isn’t really a speech until it is delivered. How can you do that effectively?

Before we get to that, however, you might have an even more pressing question on your mind: how can you give your speech without passing out? The finer points of voice delivery and gestures won’t matter much if you’re consumed with anxiety about giving your speech.


  1. https://achievement.org/achiever/james-earl-jones/#interview. SHORTER VERSIONS: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/james-earl-jones-recovered-mute-childhood/ https://www.stutteringhelp.org/famous-people/james-earl-jones https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/01/08/earl.jones.vader.mute/index.html
  2. Karpf, A. (2006). The human voice: How this extraordinary instrument reveals essential clues about who we are. New York: Bloomsbury, p. 4.
  3. If you especially dislike hearing recordings of your voice, there’s an understandable reason: when you hear your own voice, much of what you’re hearing is conducted through your bones, not through your ears, but when you hear recordings, you lose the bone conduction element. That version of your voice must sound nice, since many people think that recordings of their voice are less rich than what they normally hear. Think about it this way: if you think other people’s voices sound pleasant and rich, remember that their voices sound even nicer to them.

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Communication in Practice Copyright © by Dr. Jeremy Rose is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.