Reading Style Influences

[croissantkatie]

So, the other day myself and argentumlupine had a brief discussion about how the way people read picture books and stories to us when we were younger influenced our reading style. argentumlupine said that she thought her character voices might have been influenced by her Mom. This got me thinking, does anyone else think they're reading style was influenced by the way they were told stories when they were younger? Personally, I think the way I read was influenced by the way my Dad told bedtime stories to me when I was small. Has anyone else found something similar? Do you think anything in particular has influenced your reading style?

Comments

[pensnest]

That's an interesting thought. When I record stories, I cannot help but put in all sorts of expressions, and try to shade different voices in different ways. It feels natural to me. And I do have ancient and unusable tape recordings of my parents reading 'Winnie the Pooh' stories to me and doing the voices. (My Dad was the True Voice of Pooh, my mother made a very convincing Piglet.) So that does make sense to me.

[leish]

I can see how that would influence someone's reading style, but I don't think it had the same impact on me. When my mum reads stories, she gets very into it, does character voices and everything. I'd like to think I'm not completely flat but I'm not animated the same way she is. But that's probably because we're both very different people in terms of our personality - I'm massively introverted and she's massively extroverted, and she's comfortable with expressing herself like that in a way I'm just not.

[dmarley]

My mom's reading did have an influence on me, but in a "things I do very differently" way. I love her dearly, but she reads aloud really fast, and always kind of skipped and slurred through stories. Don't get me wrong, she cheerfully read my favorite books to me a bazillion times, so I'm not knocking her reading to me, not at all. But when I started reading aloud to my own daughter, I realized that slowing down is harder than it seems. So, I made an effort to slow down and enjoy the story and the act of reading aloud. I also found it more interesting for myself to do different voices and find a voice for the narration.

I have to say that that experience is what really influenced how I did podficcing. I had to learn how to lose my own self-consciousness when I read to my daughter, and learn not to care if I sounded like an enormous dork. After singing, "Fuzzy little snuggle puppy, I love you," about 500 times with unironic, genuine feeling, I found that there wasn't much about podficcing that made me self-conscious anymore. It was a really profound turning point for me.

[nickelmountain]

That's interesting - I never really thought about this before. My reading style is definitely influenced by my mom's. She always went for soothing over animated, and tended not to dramatize the voices very much. The older I get, the more my voice sounds like hers, too.

A random influence - for several years before I got into podfic, I had a job that required making frequent announcements over an intercom. Other people's voices on the intercom were so grating sometimes - I made a point of speaking clearly, calmly, and resonantly. It got me used to the sound of my own voice, which helped when I first started making podfic, and I definitely still hear some of my old intercom voice in my recordings now.

[greedy_dancer]

Interesting!! I'd never thought about that. I have to say although my love of spoken-aloud stories is surely linked to the fact that I demanded "a story and a song" every night before I could sleep, I can't remember the style in which those stories were read to me... SO I can't tell if I'm reproducing it or not!

But I'm quite certain that the styles I prefer to listen to (regular, soothing, as few distractions from the text as possible) must be related to those storytimes.