Well, National Public Radio does provide transcripts. The material which goes into the transcripts is very often the natural byproduct of tools like Tele-prompters. The talk-show host’s editorial assistants do pretty much what newspaper reporters do– find guests, and interview them, and reduce the conversation to a written script, and load the script into a Tele-prompter instead of a Linotype or a website. Granted, a really great actor, someone like Sir Laurence Olivier, or Katherine Hepburn, doesn’t need a Tele-prompter, but for the ordinary run of talk-show guests, it’s a useful tool, a prop against stage-fright. Before there were Tele-prompters, stage hands held up cue cards to achieve the same effect. In a movie, or a stage play, or a concert, or a musical recording, or a ballet, or a talk-show, there is an enormous amount of stuff going on backstage or in post-processing, which you do not see. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it isn’t there.

One good way to be self-critical about a podcast is to listen to your own podcast, and type up a transcript as you go. A truly spontaneous conversation would be intolerable to listen to, for a typical person who isn’t part of it, and cannot participate. What goes on at a convention, on the other hand, is mostly people reading out sections of their published official party manifestos. Of course I cannot speak as to which category your particular podcast falls into.

Let me repeat: successfully performing for a recorded medium is harder than performing for a live audience, because there is no audience feedback. Or, as Mad Magazine put it: “This show was recorded before a live laugh-track machine. It threw up!”

Back when I was teaching college classes as a Graduate Teaching Fellow, I did in fact write up a set of lecture notes, and rehearse them in front of the bathroom mirror– and I found it made the lecture go much better. One day, I stood in front of a blackboard in the graduate student lounge, and methodically started writing out “ABC…” like a first-grader. A piece of chalk handles differently than a pencil, and it is necessary to learn the difference– preferably not in front of a classroom of freshman students. On the books, the class was labeled as a “discussion section,” but I learned the hard way that ordinary freshmen do not come to class ready to discuss the readings. No matter, once I figured out that a lecture was called for, I gave them a lecture.

At one point, I took a course in Teaching History In College. It was the equivalent of a musical “master class.” There were four of us, not without some teaching experience, and we took turns in giving lectures, and the professor watched, and critiqued our performance style. I had not been consciously aware of what I was doing with eye contact, and I needed to learn to consciously manage my eye contact.

I don’t do very much business on the telephone, but when I do, I am apt to send e-mails after the fact to cover those points where I might not have expressed myself with complete clarity.

What voice is good for, as an alternative to the printed word, is introducing emotive content, and this applies also to music. A good example is HRH Prince Charles’ film, A Personal View of Architecture, 1988. This was a film presenting an essentially emotive argument about the shape of new buildings. The Prince had no intellectual justification. He just said, in essence, that all the new government and business buildings were ugly, and they made the people who lived and worked in them unhappy. The film is shamelessly filled out with baroque music, more or less in the style of Henry Purcell (?).

Take a look at Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, 1950. Highet was a Scotsman, and a “Classicist,” that is, a scholar of Ancient Greek, of course, and when he came to America, it was to Columbia University, and I don’t think he really grappled with how to teach students as insistently dumb as the average state university student, circa 1990. His principal suggestion was to quote Montaigne to the effect that “they should be apprenticed to a pastry-cook in some good town.” Still, you should understand his reasoning well enough to be able to critique it. One thing which one gets from Highet is that seemingly spontaneous public performances are not remotely as unpracticed or amateur as they look.

See also: Edwin Wilson, The Theater Experience, 1976 and subsequent editions. This is a freshman Theater textbook. It contains short discussions of all kinds of issues in stagecraft. One of the points which the author makes is that if you are speaking in public, you cannot choose not to be an actor. You can only choose whether to be a good actor or a ham actor.