Speaking Effective English!

By: Bettye Pierce Zoller, John Arthur Watkins, Hugh Lampman

Narrated by: Bettye Pierce Zoller, John Arthur Watkins, Hugh Lampman, Edward Asner

Length: 1 hr and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

In this breakthrough audio program, three of America's top voice coaches give listeners the tools they need to speak clearly, powerfully, and effectively and get what they want through the power of speech!

©1999 ZWL Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved (P)1999 Simon and Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Good but not specific

Although I learned some issues related to the topic from the book, I expected more. The book is more like generalizations and lacks enough information about specific technique that one expects from it.

Long list of stuff

Poor format, list style content.
Initially focusing on why improving your voice.

Avoid this title.

Way Different from My Expectation

I bought this for a friend to see if it could help him be just a bit more confident and more effective when speaking English.

Unfortunately it turned out to be the audiobook equivalent of one of those black & white 16mm films they showed at school to teenagers in the 1950's on topics like how to keep good self-hygeine. I found the content useless: it was literally as if I bought an audiobook that told me things on the order of "if you want to smell good, but don't want to pay the high cost of a bottle of perfume, then you will find that many stores will be glad to sell you soap with a nice, lasting scent." I'm guessing that the 3 narrators had to constantly start and stop the audio recording due to laughing at what they were saying.

Not worth your time. Waste of space.

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

When I first read about this audiobook I was really looking forward to hearing from such superstars of the voice industry (whom I had never heard of before). Like the Avengers initiative they had been assembled from all over the world (America only) to show us how to improve our speaking voices. What could build more anticipation for a great audiobook with insights and tips from experts.

Unfortunately this book was pretty much first 1/2 an hour about how great each speaker was and how awesome they are.

The editing is terrible editing (obviously recorded in different studios) and it seems like this recording was never listened to on headphones. The speakers voices are really exaggerated, annoying, over the to and NOT what I would like to sound like.

Advice is generic and does not explain how to actually improve voice just simply specifies things like "focus on speaking with intonations", but fails to show HOW to do this.

Seriously, this information could be found in wikipedia.

This audio book proved to be a considerable waste of time. Save your money and buy something else.

Has Speaking Effective English! turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes, to find a good book, now that I know what the worst is. Pretty sure I cannot go worse than this one.

What didn’t you like about the narrators’s performance?

Over the top, forced colourful fake voice.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Bad editing, over the top 'commercial' voices. Felt like I was listening to a

Any additional comments?

Simply a waste of time. False advertising, does not show how to improve voice at all for this cost.