Mark Blevis

I just re-read part 4 (Editing Decisions) and realized that I left out a very important point about the use of breath in an interview – a breath can save you.  What I mean is that a breath is a great tool to hide an edit.

Suppose a speaker says ten sentences in response to a comment, and you decide to remove the middle eight sentences. This leaves the first and tenth (now second) sentences.  The remaining two sentences may have different deliveries since they represent the bookends of a single discussion.  Having the sound of a drawn breath, and maybe even a short pause, before the new second sentence will go a long way to disguising the disconnected deliveries.

Remember to experiment with the duration of any pauses you use to “fake” natural speech.