You’ve spotted the perfect Call Centre role on s1jobs but what’s this? Instead of just talking to customers you’ll be expected to read lines from a script?
Some sectors, such as banking and insurance, are so strictly regulated they’ve been virtually mummified by red tape. What that means is customers have to know the small print – and you have to read it to them.
When reciting lines it’s hard not to sound like a badly-programmed voice simulator or one of those actors from The Only Way Is Essex.
It’s much better to learn the words off by heart, to inhabit the legal jargon and those tricky exemption clauses and deliver them in an Oscar-worthy performance than to trot them out like a shopping list.
True, in the early days you might sound more Dalek than Dr Who, but you’ll get better with practice and soon you’ll be able to make even the driest details sound like the work of Shakespeare.
But how do you learn those deadly phrases?
Here are some tricks that actors who’ve been in the words and memory business for a very long time use to learn their lines when performing on stage.
- Read through the lines many times then take a nap. While you are sleeping your brain process the information, organising and filing it where it’s easy to retrieve.
- Reading is not enough, you have to say the lines out loud to make them stick. Say them to the goldfish or the cat, recite them on the bus (in your head!), record them on your phone then play back to grade your performance.
- Jump up and down and wave your arms around while saying the lines out loud. It’s a trick primary school teachers use to help children with their spelling. All that motion helps the brain to work more effectively. Somehow it just makes things stick.
- Try saying the lines in funny voices – be Stampycat, Lady Gaga or Victor from Still Game. It’s a surprisingly effective way of supercharging your memory and it’s fun. And while you’re enjoying yourself your memory has a funny way of storing stuff without you even having to think about it.
- Write out your script. Then write it out again. Use coloured pencils, funny stencils or even oil paints. There’s something about the co-ordination from hand, to eye, to brain that makes the words come out of your mouth more fluently.
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