Excite Your Audience

Recently, I was critiquing a speech and the speaker used an exaggerated female voice during a story. The female character in the story was a bank teller. Whereas, the line did get a laugh from the crowd, I told the speaker to never do that again and here is why:

Many people see a bank teller’s job and a “women’s job” (which isn’t true by the way) and giving the teller a high pitched, weak sounding female voice could definitely be offensive to many people (both male and female) in the audience. If the women in the story had been the branch president of the bank, not only would the speaker have not used the silly voice, but that voice wouldn’t even have made sense. Why? Because a bank president is a strong, important person. Well guess what? Everyone is, or at least wants to feel like they are a strong important person, including bank tellers.

The only people that might be able to get away with something like this is are comedians, who often are trying to be offensive on purpose.

In general, the only time I recommend using an exaggerated accent for a character in a story is if you are showing that character is a positive light. Here is an example; you have a man from the deep south in your story, if you describe him as stupid or slow and then give him a voice like, “tat boiy was as anouted as a tick on a flee’s back.” Guess what? You just offended anyone from south of the Mason-Dixie line. However, if you describe the character as a warm, loving man with that southern charm and then you the accent, people will love the story.

So, when planning your speech away consider what it would be like to be a character like the ones in your story sitting in the audience.