Guidelines for narrating a Spoken Tutorial

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Speaking

- Impart instructions politely and with clarity
- Do not give orders – be friendly
- Remember to make the spoken tutorial a pleasant experience for the user
- Speak naturally.  Everybody has an accent and its okay. Do not attempt to put on an artificial accent
- Remember to speak clearly and slowly
- Keep the mic at a fixed distance from your mouth during the entire recording

Tips to cut out external noise

- Ideally, record in a closed room with minimum disturbance  
- Close the windows to cut out the noise from birds, traffic and construction
- Switching off the fan helps in reducing the hissing sound while recording
- Ideally, switch off your mobile phone before recording.  Even if you keep the mobile phone on silent mode during
 the recording, you will find that the recorded movie registers a beeping/buzzing sound when a call comes through
- The same holds good for the battery charger of a laptop.  Disconnect the charger from the laptop before recording. 
 Else you will hear a low humming sound during playback

Dummy recordings for 2-3 minutes

- Do a few dummy recordings for 2-3 minutes to finalize the recording parameters
- This will help you to predict the end file-size
- This exercise will also help you to check the clarity of the audio narration and the quality of the video
- Full-length dummy narrations will help you to improve the tone of your voice and pronunciation

Final Narration

- Ideally, try to record the whole tutorial in one go
- This will keep the tone of your voice uniform
- It will also reduce the time you spend in editing
- Use the PAUSE feature of the screencasting software wisely.  This will give you an output which requires almost no 
editing at all

While Dubbing

- If possible, remove the original audio stream completely
- If not possible, dub from the original recording – it will have only one more audio stream apart from yours

While Dubbing, make sure that...

- The audio-video synchronisation is not affected
- The meaning of the original narration does not change
- File size remains approximately same
- Recording dimensions match those of the original tutorial

What is a Spoken Tutorial

Pedagogy

How to write a Script for a Spoken Tutorial

Guidelines for Screencasting a Spoken Tutorial

Click here for more information on SPOKEN TUTORIALS

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This page has been created by Nancy Varkey on 27th April, 2010

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