3 Tips — How I Write and Read Scripts for Voice Overs

Entrepreneur and Voice Over Career Tips

It was 2003 and as part of my job before going freelance I would write scripts for voice overs of popular stations including Capital FM, BBC and the list goes on.

The rush of excitement of how I would envision and guide the voice over to read the text or deciding if I would read and record it myself, still pulses through my veins and there are 3 actionable tips that I would like to share from my years of experience.

Tip 1 How to Write a Script

A voice script can be interpreted in a variety of ways so it is important to ensure that you and any prospective client are both happy with the script you create.

When writing a script you can also find certain words work better for you or the voice over artist than others once you have read this back to yourself due to an accent or style of speaking. When writing your script, the right combination of words can leave a very lasting impression so it is important to get it right.

In order to write a script you will need to establish the type of scripts that you want to create.

Think about any music that will potentially go along with the voice artist or if there will be any background music or sound effects used. Simply imagine the voice that you will use or decide whether it is going to be your own and speak aloud to yourself. You will also need to think about the genre of the voice artist. For example, are they fun and energetic? Or do they have a particular accent that you want to come across? Are they authoritative, male, female, and so on.

Remember that punctuation matters. You will need to remember that in a script, every space, every capital letter, every full stop and every comma matters. For example in this statement:

“A car was parked. In the driveway”.

It could equally be read fast as, “a car was parked in the driveway”, or it could read slowly i.e. “a car was, parked in the driveway”. Alternatively it could be read with pauses i.e, “a car…. was parked… in the driveway”.

As you can see, there were very different ways of saying the same sentence. What mattered there was…