Mark up a script
the way professionals do.
Voice actors don’t read a script. They mark it first — which syllable carries the meaning, where the breath goes, which words to throw away. Do it here, on a real script, right now.
The committee sentence
Genuine committee copy — one sentence, four ideas, written by people who never had to say it out loud. Read it cold and it falls apart. That is the point.
These are Craig's actual marks from a live session — ten hits, three breaths, one stretch, and the small lift on a·HEAD that tells the listener you are quietly proud you finished early.
The unit isn’t the word.
It’s the syllable.
Ask most people to emphasise a word and they get louder across the whole thing. A professional doesn’t. In rhinoceros you lean on NOS. In elephant it’s EL. In successful it’s CESS — never the suc, never the ful.
Get that one thing right and everything else follows: the sentence stops being a wall of sound and becomes a series of ideas, handed over one at a time. That is the whole trick, and it is the difference between sounding like someone reading and sounding like someone telling you something.
A listener can only hold one idea at a time. So you hand them one idea at a time.
They learnt it here
Working South African voices — hear their demos.
“The attention to detail you give is amazing. It's extremely encouraging when you are making positive comments, but I'm nodding my head in agreement with the criticisms.”
Script Development & Marking
You’ve just done the easy part — marking one script with the marks already chosen for you. The masterclass is where you learn to decide them yourself, on any script that lands in your inbox. Then you record it, and Craig tells you what he hears.
Want Craig live for an hour on your own scripts? That’s the 1-on-1 session — same lesson, plus sixty minutes with him.
Built by VOISA — the Voice Over Institute of South Africa.
Free to use, free to share. If it helped, send it to someone who reads out loud for a living.
