Creating a Call Center Script

At the beginning of my creative career, I volunteered as an overnight deejay at a college radio station. I loved playing the music and interacting with insomniac listeners, but I got a real kick out of reading the news. I would tear copy straight off the wire service printer and if I was lucky, I had a producer turn that raw newsfeed into informational text that I read into the microphone. The text was broken up into reasonable sentences that were designed for easy delivery over the air. When my producer didnt show up for my shift, I did this myself Id mark up the page, insert pauses, and emphasize the words and sentence clauses that I wanted to stress. If I couldnt be understood over a fuzzy and weak AM signal, then what was the point of taking five minutes at the top of the hour to deliver the news? I had a lot of fun and I learned how to speak all over again. Whenever I do any live speaking today, I use the same exact techniques that I learned while the On-Air sign was flashing above the studio. I mark up my speech or the text passage Im reading because I know that impact is everything. If I lose my breath in the middle of a sentence, then its too long. If the...