Speaking With Skill: An Introduction to Knight-Thompson Speech Work (Performance Books) Paperback – CD, September 26, 2012

This is a great book for those who want to develop kinesthesia/proprioception of various articulators (tongue, jaw, lips, buccinator, etc). There are detailed exercises to isolate every muscle involved in speech production. For instance, a typical phonetics talks about vowels in terms of tongue height and front/backness; but the question is how to feel where your tongue's position is? Here, Dudley is of great help: the book has exercises on isolating muscles like styloglossus, hyoglossus, transverse, verticalis, superior/inferior longitudinal muscles. Once you are aware of how each muscle acts, you are almost there to feel where your tongue arches/bunches/cups, etc. Besides these exercises, Dudley talks about "oral posture" , which is similar to Edinburgh's Vocal profile analysis scheme (VPAS), developed by John Laver and continued by John Esling, et al. Oral posture is another way of capturing any accent, since IPA narrow transcriptions do not tell the whole story about accents. Over all, a great book for aspiring actors, future dialect coaches, students of phonetics.

Such a great resource, and a good read to boot! A great marriage of factual information and imaginative presentation. This is the only book I can assign my speech students with no reservations-- I don't have to clarify or provide caveats about the information here. I don't have to worry about any implicit linguistic bias-- the author tackles that can of worms from the very beginning, and sets "intelligibility" as the standard for speech training, not any one accent. It's a window into possibility, not a recipe for "correctness"-- totally freeing for my acting students. Highly recommended.

First off, "thank you" to the seller, the book is in great condition! This book goes over several pronunciations (You know how people talk different in each part of the country? Some pronunciations may sound silly to some people, this book demonstrates the actual pronunciation of words). It's important to know these things, especially if you want to get into public speaking.

Great resource for developing your speech. The dvd did not work on my dvd player. However, I was able to access the audio files through my computer. Hope this helps for those who couldn't get the dvd working!

A must have for actors or anyone interested in speech. The in depth approach that this book takes is work, but it will leave you with an awareness you didn't think possible.

I'm hoping someone from Amazon can contact me back about this, then I will happily change my review. I ordered the Kindle version because of all the reviews stating that the DVD only works in a computer drive, & I don't have the equipment to play that kind of disc. I went to the audio straight away - they're links to YouTube, which cannot be played because they're private & I don't have access to them. Can anyone tell me how to fix this so I can access the audio files?

Exceptional. Hands down the best book on speech and speech training that I've ever encountered.

The DVD included with the text doesn't work, other than that I'm reading this book for a class and I enjoy it.