Have you ever been in the audience and listened to a speaker who just drones on and on...? If you have attended college or worked in the corporate world, chances are you have. This is because in these environments, people are chosen to speak based on their education, experience, and position, not their ability to speak. While it is great to have knowledgeable people speaking, the unfortunate side effect is an audience that stops paying attention, doesn't get the point, and may even fall asleep!

Speaking is an art form, and the ability to keep an audience engaged is critical to the speaker. One way of doing that is to use your voice as a tool to draw the audience in. The dictionary defines drone as "to speak in a monotonous tone." Monotonous is defined as "spoken in an unvarying tone." Therefore, if you don't want to drone on as a speaker, you must learn to vary your tone.

Varying your tone sounds simple enough; just mix up the volume, pitch, and speed of your speech. The challenge is that while varying your tone sounds simple, it can be hard to do. This happens for two reasons:

1. In our own heads, when we speak, we tend to hear how we think we sound. You may think you are varying your voice a whole lot, but to an audience you may be completely monotonous.

2. You can end up so focused on your content and the words that you have to say that you may completely forget or ignore the delivery. This could be due to nerves, lack of preparation, insecurity, or many other things. Regardless, once you forget about delivery, you fall back on to whatever speaking style you have always had. If that happens to be a bit "drone-y," then you will bore your audience.

The first challenge is easy enough to fix: Either record yourself speaking and listen to it later (I know this can be painful, but it's invaluable!) or ask for sincere audience feedback from people you trust to give you honest but constructive criticism. Joining a Toastmasters club is a great way to do this.

The second challenge is a lot harder. How do you shift some of your focus to delivery when it's all you can do to control your fear and remember what you have to say next?

The simple way is to completely separate content from delivery. To do this, use an improv comedy technique called "gibberish." Gibberish is defined as "unintelligible or nonsensical talk." Quite simply, pretend to deliver a lecture, but rather than speaking English (or whatever your native tongue is), speak in gibberish. Make a series of nonsensical sounds as you pretend to speak to an audience.

At this point, your content is irrelevant. As you do this lecture, really play around with the speed, volume, and pitch of your voice. When doing this, really go "over the top" with it. Remember, in your own head you probably think your variety is much bigger then it is. By using gibberish, you can focus 100% on your delivery.

Once you get a little bit comfortable just playing with the variety in gibberish, you can take it up a notch with a fun partner exercise called the Gibberish Expert:

You will be an expert on some simple, everyday topic. You will then deliver a lecture on this topic, but you will speak only in gibberish. After every couple of sentences, pause, and let your partner "translate" what you just said in gibberish. In a performance, there are comedic gimmicks to make this exercise funnier (i.e. you speak in gibberish for 45 seconds and your partner translates with a single word like, "therefore"). For the purpose of learning vocal variety, you don't want to do this. The goal here is to get your partner to translate as correctly as possible what you are saying, using just your tone and voice. You will have a tendency to use your hands and body; This is fine to a degree, but don't turn this into a game of charades. You should deliver your gibberish as if the audience understood you. By practicing this, you will gain an understanding of how to use the tone of your voice to convey as much information as the words you say.

Of course, when you get in front of an audience you will not speak in gibberish. However, by practicing with gibberish you will be prepared to take the stage, keep an audience engaged, and never have anyone fall asleep on you!