I spent the first two years of performing convinced that my voice was fine.
I had opinions about my material. I had thoughts about my pacing. I tracked my eye contact and my hand positions and the relationship between where I was standing and where the audience was looking. But my voice? That was just what my voice was. It worked. People could hear me. What more was there?
Then I read Patsy Rodenburg’s The Right to Speak, and I had one of those uncomfortable moments where a book quietly dismantles something you thought you understood.
Rodenburg is a voice coach who has worked with the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and individual performers whose names you would recognize. Her thesis, stripped to its core, is this: most of us have never really learned to use our voice. We learned to make sounds adequate for getting through the day. That is not the same thing.
What Articulation Actually Is
Most people, when they hear “articulation,” think of enunciation — pronouncing words clearly so people understand you. That’s part of it, but it’s the surface layer.
Real articulation is about muscular engagement. The consonants, the vowels, the spaces between words — all of these are physical acts performed by the lips, the tongue, the jaw, the soft palate. If any of those muscles are lazy or underused, your speech will be muddy, imprecise, or exhausting for listeners to follow, even if they can technically understand every word.
Most adults — especially people who work in offices, give presentations, spend their days in meetings — have underworked articulation muscles. We speak in a comfortable middle range. We don’t push the corners of our mouths. We don’t work the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper teeth. We get by.
On stage, getting by is not enough. The effort of listening to someone with lazy articulation is imperceptible to the speaker and very perceptible to the audience. After twenty minutes, they’re tired. After forty minutes, they’re tuned out. And they can’t always explain why.
The Pencil
The exercise is simple enough that you’ll be tempted to dismiss it. Don’t.
Take a pencil — a regular wooden pencil, or a pen, or anything of similar shape. Hold it horizontally between your back teeth, towards the sides of your mouth, so it’s sitting in place without your hands. Now speak. Read a passage aloud. Say your patter. Deliver a section of your routine.
It is immediately, profoundly uncomfortable. Your jaw can’t drop properly. Your tongue has limited space to move. The sounds that come out are garbled and strange. You are forced — physically forced — to work harder than usual to produce anything intelligible. Your lips do more. Your tongue works against the constraint. Your whole articulation system has to engage at a higher level just to be heard.
Then take the pencil out and speak the same passage again.
What happens is immediate and slightly eerie. The words come out cleaner, crisper, more distinct. Not because you’ve suddenly learned to speak better, but because your muscles are now warm and engaged from the effort. You’ve activated the articulation system in a way that normal speech doesn’t require. The contrast is stark enough that you can hear it yourself, which is the crucial element — you develop sensory feedback about what engaged articulation actually feels like.
What I Found When I Tried It
I first tried this in a hotel room in Vienna, feeling faintly ridiculous with a pencil hanging from my teeth while I ran through the opening section of a keynote. The garbled sounds were worse than I expected. There were specific phonemes — the soft ‘th’, the crisp ‘t’, certain consonant combinations — that disappeared almost entirely under the constraint. Which meant I had been imprecise about them all along without knowing it.
When I took the pencil out, the difference was real. More than that, it was learnable. After a few weeks of doing this before practice sessions, the engaged feeling started to become familiar. I could access it without the pencil — not perfectly, but intentionally. I could feel when I was being lazy with a word and correct it in the moment.
For a performer who also works with language — patter, scripted lines, improvised exchanges — this is more than a voice exercise. It’s a reminder that words are physical objects. They are made by the body. If the body isn’t engaged, the words are half-finished.
The Larger World of Voice Work
The pencil exercise is one small entry point into something much larger that I’ve come to take seriously.
Rodenburg writes about the relationship between breath and voice in a way that initially sounded almost mystical to me — she talks about the voice as connected to the whole person, to the emotional life, to what she calls the “second circle” of presence (direct engagement with the space and the people in front of you). I was skeptical. I’m a consultant. I’m trained to think in frameworks, not circles.
But the practical reality of what she describes is undeniable. When you breathe shallowly — which most people do when nervous — your voice becomes tight. It loses resonance. It loses authority. You can feel it as a speaker: the thinning out that happens under pressure, the voice going up in pitch, the sentences getting shorter because you’re running out of air.
Breath work addresses this at the root. Not affirmations. Not “calm down” self-talk. Actual breath: slower, lower, more intentional. The voice follows the breath. This is physiology, not philosophy.
For performing magicians, especially those moving into keynote or stage work, voice training tends to get deprioritized in favor of effect practice. We work on our hands, our timing, our patter. The actual instrument we’re speaking through gets whatever’s left over.
That’s backwards. The voice is what the audience experiences continuously, for the entire duration of the show. The effects happen intermittently. If your voice is tight, rushed, or unclear, the cumulative effect on the audience’s experience is far greater than any single effect fumbled in performance.
A Note on Pace
One thing the pencil exercise made undeniably clear: I was rushing consonants. Not words — individual sounds within words were getting compressed, swallowed, blurred together. This is almost always a symptom of pace anxiety. When we feel the need to fill space, we speed up. When we speed up, precision goes first.
The interesting discovery was that slowing down felt indulgent to me in the beginning. Like I was taking too much time. But from the audience’s perspective, slower and more precise is not indulgent — it’s authoritative. The performer who speaks with precision and takes their time with words signals something about their relationship to the material. They know it cold. They’re not worried about running out. They can afford to give each word its weight.
That’s a different performer than the one nervously filling space. And it’s a shift available to anyone willing to spend twenty minutes with a pencil in a practice room.
The Tactile Reminder
What I’ve come to appreciate about the pencil exercise specifically — as opposed to other voice drills — is its concreteness. You can feel exactly what’s happening. The constraint creates immediate, physical feedback that abstract instruction can’t replicate. You know immediately whether your tongue is working or not, because you can feel the constraint fighting back.
This matters for anyone who learns through practice rather than theory. I can read about articulation all day. But ten minutes with a pencil does more for my actual performance than hours of reading about what good articulation is supposed to feel like.
I still do some version of this before speaking events — not always with a literal pencil, but at least five minutes of deliberate text spoken slowly enough to feel each consonant land. It is not glamorous preparation. Neither is most of what makes performance work.