There is a word that haunted me for the better part of a year: “prestidigitation.”
I do not even use this word in performance. I am not the type of performer who drops arcane vocabulary to sound impressive. But it kept coming up in conversations about magic — at Vulpine Creations events, in discussions with Adam Wilber, at dinners with other magicians. And every single time I tried to say it, I mangled it. Pres-ti-digit-a — no. Presti-digi — no. The word was a minefield of syllables, and I stepped on a different one every time.
This was annoying in casual conversation. But it pointed to a larger problem that was actively affecting my performances: I had trouble words scattered throughout my scripts that I was unconsciously working around rather than solving. Words I would substitute at the last moment with something easier. Phrases I would paraphrase rather than deliver as written. Entire sentences I would skip because I knew there was a verbal trap buried in them somewhere.
I was not aware of how much this was costing me until I encountered a pronunciation exercise from the world of radio production, tucked into Cara Hamilton’s guide on storytelling for magicians. Hamilton spent twelve years as a radio producer and presenter, and she trained professionals in engaging speech. The exercise she describes is so simple it borders on absurd. And it works so well that I now use it as a standard part of my preparation for every performance.
The Exercise
Here is the exercise, exactly as I learned it.
Take a pencil — or a pen, the non-pointed end facing inward — and place it on your tongue. Not far back. Just resting on the tongue, held lightly between your teeth. Now say the troublesome word twenty times. It will sound terrible. Your tongue is pinned, your articulation is compromised, and the word will come out garbled and barely recognizable. That is the point.
After twenty repetitions with the pencil on your tongue, shift it. Hold the pencil in your mouth horizontally, like a dog carrying a stick. Your lips are now stretched around it, and your mouth is forced into an unnatural shape. Say the troublesome word twenty more times. Again, it will sound awful.
Now remove the pencil and say the word normally.
The first time I did this, I actually laughed. The word came out clean, crisp, and effortless. After forty repetitions under artificial difficulty, normal pronunciation felt like stepping out of a swimming pool and discovering you can run faster on land. My tongue and lips had been forced to work harder than necessary, and when the obstacle was removed, the combined effort was more than sufficient.
Why It Works
The principle behind the exercise is overloading the articulatory system. Your tongue and lips are muscles, and like all muscles, they can be trained. When you force them to produce a word under conditions of artificial constraint — with a pencil blocking normal tongue movement or stretching the lips into an unusual position — each component of your articulation has to work independently and at greater intensity than normal.
When you remove the constraint, the muscles are primed and slightly fatigued in a way that paradoxically produces cleaner output. The neural pathways for the word have been activated repeatedly under stress, and the normal version of the word — with full freedom of movement — feels easy by comparison.
This is the same principle behind weighted practice in athletics. Swing a heavier bat, and the normal bat feels light. Run with ankle weights, and running without them feels effortless. The pencil exercise applies this logic to speech, and it is remarkably effective for words that involve complex tongue-and-lip coordination.
The Trouble Words I Did Not Know I Had
The pencil exercise solved my “prestidigitation” problem in about three minutes. But its real value became apparent when I started applying it systematically to my performance scripts.
I recorded myself delivering every script in my working repertoire. Then I listened back and marked every word where my pronunciation was less than perfectly clean. Not the dramatic stumbles — those I had already identified and fixed using the stumble test I wrote about previously. These were the subtle imprecisions. Words that were almost right but slightly soft. Consonants that were not fully articulated. Vowels that slid into adjacent sounds. The kind of small pronunciation issues that an audience might not consciously notice but that cumulatively make a performance sound less polished than it could be.
The list was longer than I expected. As a native German speaker performing in English, I had certain predictable trouble spots — “th” sounds that wanted to become “d” sounds, “w” sounds that drifted toward “v,” certain vowel distinctions that do not exist in German. But I also had trouble spots that had nothing to do with my native language. Complex English words with unusual syllable patterns. Technical terms that I had read many times but spoken rarely. Names of historical figures that I had encountered only in text.
I spent a week running every trouble word through the pencil exercise. Twenty repetitions with the pencil on the tongue. Twenty with the pencil held like a stick. Then the word spoken normally, clean and clear. I must have looked absolutely unhinged to anyone who walked past my hotel room door — a grown man in a business suit, holding a pencil in his mouth, repeating “mnemonic” and “susceptible” and “phenomenon” like incantations.
But by the end of that week, my spoken English was noticeably cleaner. Not just to me — Adam mentioned it during a Vulpine Creations call. “You sound different,” he said. “More crisp.” He did not know about the pencil. He just heard the result.
Applying It Beyond Single Words
Once I saw how effective the exercise was for individual words, I started experimenting with phrases and short sentences. This is not explicitly part of Hamilton’s original exercise, but the logic extends naturally.
There were certain phrases in my scripts that consistently came out slightly muddy — not because of a single troublesome word, but because of the combination of sounds where one word ended and the next began. Transitions between words can be just as treacherous as the words themselves. The end of one word and the beginning of the next create a combined articulation challenge that does not exist when you practice the words in isolation.
For phrase-level trouble spots, I modified the exercise slightly. I would isolate the problematic phrase — usually three to five words — and run it through the pencil drill. Twenty times with the pencil on the tongue. Twenty with it held horizontally. Then spoken normally. The improvement was just as dramatic as with single words.
One phrase I remember working on was “patterns beneath perception.” Three words that sounded great in my head and came out as a mushy blend when I tried to say them at performance speed. The “ts” at the end of “patterns” collided with the “b” at the start of “beneath,” and “beneath perception” had a “th-p” transition that my mouth wanted to skip over. After the pencil drill, each word maintained its distinct shape even at speed. The phrase went from muddy to sharp.
The Radio Connection
Hamilton’s background as a radio producer is relevant here, because radio is a medium where pronunciation clarity is not optional. Unlike stage performance, where gesture, facial expression, and physical presence can compensate for imperfect speech, radio depends entirely on the voice. Every word must be perfectly clear because the listener has no visual information to fill in the gaps.
Radio producers, as Hamilton notes, trained their presenters using exercises like the pencil drill because even highly educated, articulate people have pronunciation blind spots. The exercise was not remedial — it was professional. The best radio presenters in the world used physical drills to ensure their on-air speech was cleaner and more precise than their everyday conversation.
This reframing was important for me. I had initially felt slightly embarrassed by the exercise, as if needing a pencil drill meant my English was deficient. But understanding that professional broadcasters — people whose entire career depends on spoken clarity — routinely use these techniques made me see it differently. It is not about fixing a weakness. It is about pursuing a standard of precision that separates professional delivery from casual speech.
The Warm-Up Routine
The pencil exercise has become part of my pre-performance warm-up. Before any keynote, any corporate show, any significant performance, I spend five to ten minutes with a pencil.
My warm-up routine works like this. I start with the five or six words in my current set that have the highest articulation difficulty. These are the words I have identified through recording and reviewing my scripts. I run each one through the full pencil drill — twenty on the tongue, twenty held horizontally, then spoken normally.
Then I move to three or four trouble phrases. Same drill, applied to the multi-word combinations that challenge my mouth.
Finally, I deliver the opening two minutes of my performance with the pencil on my tongue. This is the most important warm-up step, because the opening of any performance is when nerves are highest and articulation is most likely to suffer. By delivering the opening under artificial constraint, I ensure that when I walk on stage and deliver it normally, it comes out clean and confident.
The entire warm-up takes less than ten minutes. I do it in the hotel room, in the car, in the venue’s green room. I do it even when I feel confident and do not think I need it. Especially then. The day you skip the warm-up because you feel good is the day your mouth decides to surprise you with a stumble on a word you have said a thousand times.
Beyond English
One unexpected benefit of the pencil exercise has been its application to the German-language scripts I use for performances in Austria. German has its own pronunciation challenges — long compound words, specific vowel sounds, and rapid-fire consonant clusters that even native speakers can stumble on under performance pressure.
I had always assumed that my German delivery was fine because it is my first language. But when I started applying the same diagnostic process — recording, reviewing, identifying soft spots — I found trouble words in my German scripts too. Not many, but enough to matter. Words that I pronounced slightly differently under the stress of performance than in casual conversation. Long compounds that lost clarity at speed. Technical terms from my consulting vocabulary that sounded precise in a boardroom but slightly mechanical on a stage.
The pencil drill worked just as well for German trouble words. The principle is universal because it works at the level of muscle training, not language learning. Whether the word is English or German, the tongue and lips still need to coordinate complex movements, and the pencil exercise still forces them to work harder than necessary so that normal speech becomes easier.
The Willingness to Look Ridiculous
I want to address something that might prevent people from trying this exercise: it looks absurd. You are a grown adult, holding a pencil in your mouth, repeating words like a strange parrot. If someone walks in on you, there is no dignified explanation available. “I’m training my articulatory musculature” does not make you sound less peculiar.
But this is, I have found, a useful filter. The willingness to look ridiculous in private practice is directly correlated with improvement in public performance. Every serious performer I admire has private practices that would look bizarre to an outside observer. The hotel room sessions. The mirror work. The slow-motion hand movements practiced for hours. The vocal exercises that sound like a person having a conversation with themselves.
The pencil exercise is just one more entry in the catalog of things that look foolish in private and produce professional results in public. If you care more about looking dignified in your hotel room than sounding clear on stage, you have your priorities reversed.
A Small Investment with Outsized Returns
Of all the practice techniques I have adopted over the years — from systematic repetition drills to video review to performance journaling — the pencil exercise has one of the best effort-to-result ratios. Three minutes of work on a trouble word produces permanent improvement. Ten minutes of warm-up before a performance produces noticeably cleaner delivery throughout. The investment is tiny. The return is substantial.
And it compounds. As you systematically eliminate trouble words from your scripts, your overall spoken fluency improves. You develop greater awareness of your own articulation. You start catching potential trouble words during the writing phase, before they reach the rehearsal phase. Your scripts become easier to deliver because you have trained yourself to recognize and avoid the sound combinations that trip you up.
The pencil exercise is not glamorous. It is not a breakthrough insight about the nature of performance or the psychology of audiences. It is a small, practical tool from the world of radio production that solves a small, practical problem. But small, practical problems, left unsolved, accumulate into performances that feel slightly less polished, slightly less confident, slightly less professional than they should.
A pencil. Your tongue. Twenty repetitions. That is all it takes. The word that has been haunting your script — the one you unconsciously paraphrase every time, the one that makes you slightly tense when you approach it — can be conquered in three minutes.
You just have to be willing to look ridiculous for those three minutes. In my experience, that is a trade worth making every single time.