Stay Home, Stay Safe.. How do you say it?

Mohammad Sameh

If you are a non native English speaker, there is a high probability that you won’t be familiar with word stressing rules. In the English language stressing of the words in different parts of the sentence has its own rules and as a voiceover artist, you need to be aware of these rules. In this brief article we are going here to discuss some of the word sequence stressing rules.

Let us assume that amid the current global circumstances of the corona virus outbreak, one of your clients calls you to voice a script for awareness reasons. There is a very high probability that the script will have the following phrase “ Stay Home…Stay Safe “since everyone is preaching for it globally.

So as a non native English speaking voiceover artist, you would probably  follow your guts and stress on whatever sounds good to your ears, but in reality it has a rule in the language. If there is a verb that is followed by a noun, the general rule is to stress on the noun. So in this case if you will perform the following sentence “Stay Home..Stay Safe” You will need to stress on the words “home” and “safe”.

Another stressing issue that you will probably face in your script is when there is noun that is followed by another noun like “Corona Virus”. This also has a general rule which is stressing on the first noun.

Try it out: Countries are fighting Corona Virus

But there is always an exception! the exception happens when the 1st noun tells you when or where the second noun is. So if you say ” African Countries” the stress will be on Countries not African.

Give it a try and say it loud” African Countries still have less Corona Virus cases than Europe”

Another exception will be if the first noun is the material of the second noun.

So if you say “Alcohol Sanitizer” you need to stress on Sanitizer not Alcohol.

Give that a try too “ I need to use Alcohol Sanitizer”

Anyway, these were only just tips for performing but what you really need to do these days is just to take care of yourself and to “Stay Home…Stay Safe”