Back in my college days, as an adjunct to my part-time job as a newspaper sports writer, I assisted in radio broadcasts of some basketball games.

“You sound good,” I was told. Some people also told me that while my voice sounded good, I had nothing interesting to say. Hah! Probably fans of the losing team, right?

But sounding good involves more than vocal cords. It isn’t what we say so much as it is what the people hear. All too often, we forget that when we write down our speeches, and just assume that paragraphs that look good to our eyes will sound good to others’ ears.

There are tricks.

When I want to make an upcoming speech or presentation as polished as possible, I record my written remarks so I can hear how they sound, not just see how they look. All of us stumble over pronouncing words that we use in comfort while writing. Many of us speak a sort of dialect. I regularly say, “dudn’t” for “doesn’t,” and “idn’t” for “isn’t.’ I follow our regional dialect, omitting the final “g” in “huntin’,” “fishin’,’ and the like.

So as I listen, I change “doesn’t/dudn’t” to “does not,” to speak that sentence more clearly.

I also like to get someone else to either read aloud to me or tape-record the words I have written. Hearing my words through another’s voice lets my ears pick out rough spots in the cadence and clarity.

Writing words that are intended to be spoken takes me away from the mostly declarative syntax used in print journalism. In print, most readers clearly follow a subordinate clause, such as these very words.

But hearers sometimes miss the transitions. It can be better to break multi-clause paragraphs into separate sentences.

For decades, written versions speeches have been written in all capital letters. I still do that, but I think that the connection is more historical than actual. Way back in the 1800s, telegraph messages were in all capital letters to avoid the need for two sets of Morse code for each letter, upper case and lower case. When radio came in the 1900s, news reports delivered to announcers and sportscasters kept that all-caps format. All-caps became familiar to me in early adulthood when we still used Morse code to send running accounts of Friday evening football games to the sports departments of Saturday morning newspapers.

Should speeches be typed in all caps? Maybe. Maybe not.

But I do think that double-line spacing is vital. Sure, it takes up more sheets of paper. This article has by now taken up about one page in Microsoft Word, in 14-point type. If I were preparing to deliver it as a speech, I would increase the type size to 18 points, a quarter-inch high. I would use the all-caps format, because I am familiar with it.

But I wouldn’t stick to just straight Roman type. I make extensive use of boldface type for words or phrases that I want to emphasize. I also put half dozen spaces before and after each bold-faced word or phrase. That reminds me to look up and make eye contact with someone in the audience. The spaced-out words and the bold type allow me to easily return to the spot where I had paused.

Hand and facial gestures and expressions are a whole other matter.

I have painfully endured watching video recordings that show how my doltish swing-a-hammer arm gestures and my involuntary facial grimaces can screw up a good speech at a wedding, a funeral or a meeting.

Over time, I have learned to limit hand gestures by holding on to the sides of a podium where available. If I am just standing up with no props, there is nothing for it but to gesture away, and remember to smile as I jerk my arm up and down, lest my audience think that the gestures are threatening or insulting.

If you have gotten this far in this essay, you know that I like fairly rare words or sophisticated phrases on occasion. Examples herein include “adjunct,” “cadence” and “syntax.”

When I put what is intended as a speech down on paper, I use those words in the first draft, because I am comfortable with writing them. Later, I go through the speech and substitute plainer speech. Using the above examples, we get: “a part of,” “rhythm,” “sentence structure.”

Listeners don’t have the advantage of being able, in an eye blink, to go back over an unclear phrase, as we can do while reading.

Almost everybody gets nervous before a speech. I have given thousands of them. I still feel my shoulder blades tightening as the speaking time draws near.

Being prepared lightens that burden.

The most important thing in communications, whether in print or spoken, isn’t the voice or the chosen words.

What matters most is that we connect with audiences. It doesn’t really matter how we look or what words we choose. What counts is how the people at the other end hear what we have to say.

As the late, great comedian and raconteur W.C. Fields immortalized, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with ….” umm … hogwash!

It works. Good luck.

• ? ?

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.