It’s All Coming Together

I received the paperback proof copy of my book on January 22, 2025. That’s a pic of me the day I got it. I was, and still am, so happy to hold something physical in my hands instead of seeing the words I’ve seen on a computer screen scroll by for the past four years.

Today, I made the last changes and sent them to the publisher! I’m sure I’ll notice many things I’d like to change after this point, but I feel really good that I made some small changes this late in the process. I like that this is happening on Valentine’s Day.

You can’t read the subtitle on the book in that pic because it’s so small, but it was one that I asked for your help choosing. The full title is: “Thinking About Speaking: The Adastra Approach to Mastering the American English Accent.”

The cover is the one most voted for with just a small change to the title format. I’m really happy with it!

It’s been great to be able to share so many milestones on this book writing journey with you. It was last February when I first sent the first 10 chapters of my book to the publisher for editing. I wasn’t very fast to review and work on the edits when they were returned to me multiple times, but I never had a deadline in mind so this got stretched out over a year’s time. I also had to put a renewed focus on my business last year so priorities kept changing. That makes it all the more exciting to be at this point one year later.

Besides setting up a way to buy the book on my website, I’m also working on putting the majority of the book (what’s not in the printed version) in a format that can be downloaded. That will be all the actual descriptions and examples of sound changes in pronunciation. I’d like to add audio to it, so that will slow down the process, but I’ll keep you posted.

Thank you all for your encouragement all along the way!

In With the New

In addition to online group instruction, another change I’m making this spring is to the private speech coaching I do. Similar to the monthly meetings in the group, I’m modifying my private lessons to make it easier to follow the cycle approach that I believe works best. I’ve divided it into quarters so the complete course takes one year, but stays on track with monthly, weekly, and daily speech practice.

New Individual Coaching Format

The first three months can be taken on its own as a “Quick Start” program that focuses on the main areas of prosody, word stress, and pronunciation. It begins with a full speech evaluation. Everything is modified for different languages so the practice includes specific sounds or intonation issues that are unique to the influence of other languages on English.

The next three cycles are three months each and focus on the higher-level aspects of American English such as pitch range and intonation in cycle 2, the details of pronunciation in cycle 3, and the integration and application of all the skills to your professional speaking situations.

The set of 10 lessons and three evaluations that I’ve been doing for quite a while usually take people a year to complete so this 12-month program isn’t a big change. What’s different is the structured approach to each cycle and each month within the cycle. Each month includes:

• Lesson on a specific speech feature

• Feedback on all practice recordings

• Daily prompts for mini-practice (can be done in under 5 minutes)

• Weekly check-ins

• Monthly speech evaluation update

Even with the new organization, there will always be application to your vocabulary and language you use in your professional speaking situations. The great benefit of private speech coaching is that it is immediately applicable to your daily speech.

If you’d like to learn more about private speech coaching, you can schedule a free consultation here:

Schedule a Consultation

Hello!

It has been a while since I’ve sent you anything and today I am letting you know that I’m BACK. As many of you know, I worked for a year and a half writing the book about accent modification that I had always wanted to write, I came to a stop in October, 2022. I made a big move across the country in 2023 so no progress was made on it until the end of the year when I got a fantastic opportunity to have help publishing my book. I have been editing it by clearing out all my notes to myself and the things I had left to make decisions about until later, because now it IS later. Just minutes ago, I sent the first 10 chapters to the publisher and will get help with proofreading and editing. This is super exciting for me!

What I’ve Done So Far

The first 10 chapters are all about the what, who, why, and how:

What is accent modification? What is my approach based on?

Who is it for? Who decides to do it?

Why do people choose to do it?

How do the actual consultation, evaluation, and teaching work?

I think these sections will be of interest to both the people who want to learn about accent modification for themselves and the teachers who want to teach it to others.

Some sections might be more specific to teaching; I included everything I currently do and why because it’s the details I wished I would have learned in graduate school but didn’t. I integrated parts of teaching English as a second language, Speech-Language Pathology, psychology, and habit creation. Maybe this should be a teacher’s edition with the specific assessment materials I use.

Some sections might be more specific to the people who want to learn how to improve their English speaking skills because it goes beyond practice exercises and goes into why it’s so complicated psychologically and emotionally.

What’s left?

This has me wondering about where to go from here. The first 10 chapters are the tip of the iceberg. What’s left is a huge amount of actual information about how spoken English works, the details of individual sounds and sound changes based on real speech. There are tons of examples.

It’s the phonetics book I wish I had in graduate school but didn’t. It’s the teaching material I wish I had but didn’t. This goes beyond short descriptions and practice exercises, it goes deep into the why things sound the way they do. I tried to think of every question about speech that I’ve been asked over the years and what kind of detailed answer I would give. Not everyone needs or wants that detailed of an answer, but if they do, this is where they’ll get it. I often think of the questions Eva asks in the Meetups and what kind of answers she likes and that gives me hope that there might be even more people who would like them too.

I think this part should have audio with it. I would be so much better with audio and not just a book. So should I make it a book at all? An e-book? Or make it a website? How would you most like to have this kind of information? I’d like to hear your suggestions.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of both parts - the book and the to-be-decided book or other formatted material.

322 Days

This week's newsletter is a bit late because I didn't want to stop writing until I reached my real stopping point. In my last writing milestone update, I thought my 300th day would be June 28th! The website Time and Date that I use to calculate time between dates tells me that yesterday was actually my 322nd day of writing but I was so close to finishing a real complete draft at day 300 that I didn’t want to stop. I can finally say that I don’t have anything lingering in the back of my mind that I want to get on paper. Not right now, but I’m sure something will pop up later. It’s been a weird feeling to reach this point after working on it almost every day since I started the outline on March 22, 2021. My writing program, Scrivener, shows me that I’ve written 161,838 words.

Time and Date also broke down the duration like this:

Now What?

I’m not sure what to do with the massive amount of writing that I’ve done. I don’t know anything about publishing and this really needs audio since it’s all about speech, so should it be a book at all? An e-book? A website? I’ve started making it into online courses, but I’d also like to see it all together in one place and not just chopped into separate courses. It has two distinct halves, the first half being the research, theory, and method of accent modification and the second half being all the application of the method in examples and practice.

Who I Wrote To/For

I really see it as three different topics that could stand alone on their own because I wrote this to specific people as I wrote.

Myself in grad school

I wrote to the me in grad school who was always looking for information about accent modification and couldn’t find it. I put together parts of speech-language pathology, teaching English as a second language, cognitive psychology, and habit building to create a much more all-encompassing view of speech than anything I could find in grad school.

What it is

1. What is Speech?

2. Myth Busting

3. Who chooses accent modification

4. The Speech Habit

Teachers I've worked with

I wrote to the teachers I’ve worked with over the years who were interested in learning more about how to teach it and find materials to use. I never had one book that I could use that met my purposes. As I used parts of different books to meet my needs, I always said that someday I’d make my own book that had everything I wanted in it.

How it’s done - Teaching/Coaching

1. Consultation

2. Evaluation & Reflection

3. Methodology

4. Tracking Progress

Everyone I've taught

I wrote to the students and clients I’ve worked with who always asked “why?” and wanted to learn more than just what a practice exercise provided. It's not difficult to find materials for the how to do it for spoken English, but when someone wanted to know why it was never in the same book so that’s what I put all in the same place. Sometimes I thought it was too much detail, that it was turning into a phonetics text book and drifting away from teaching essentials. However, my clients and regular attendees in my Meetups ask me very detailed questions that I never used to get from students so I know they will appreciate it. I went with the plan that it's better to put it all out there and then cut it back or let people choose how much they want rather than hold back and regret not doing it all at once.

What to do - Lessons

1. Prosody

2. Word Stress

3. Vowels

4. Consonants

5. Connections

6. Applying All Speech Features

On to the Next Project

In my 200th writing milestone update, I wondered how I’d feel at the 300th milestone and it’s not what I expected. I do feel done with something, but I know it’s not the end. I’ll be filling that daily writing time in my schedule with writing the online courses and updating my materials but that’s different. I’m not creating the words, I’m cutting and pasting and connecting them together. I feel a little sad about the creative part being finished, kind of lost without it. Maybe I’ll find the course-making process more creative than I have in the little that I’ve started so far. I haven’t focused on it until now.

No matter what happens or never happens with the 161,838 words I’ve written, it feels awesome to get them out of my head. I don't know how long I've said I wanted to write my own book and I finally did it. It's still a weird feeling, not the jumping up and down excited feeling you might imagine. Maybe after a year and a half of writing I'm just exhausted and it doesn't seem real yet. I'll keep you posted.

Today is my 200th day of writing my book!

I use timeanddate.com to calculate how many days ahead the next set of 100 will be and exclude weekends and holidays. Having a specific date helps put things into perspective and creates milestones. Since this is my first time writing outside of being in school as a student or professor, it feels weird to not have any time markers like semesters. I like measures of time passing and I like goal lines. The next 100th day will be June 28, 2022. That’s a good date, the end of the month that’s halfway through the year. I’m going to set my goal for that right now….but where am I now?

As the end of 2021 got closer, I realized I wouldn’t make my goal of having a complete draft of the book by the end of the year because I hadn’t written about how to actually produce every vowel and consonant sound. That may seem like the only thing I would be writing about since I’m writing about American English pronunciation, right? Actually, there’s so much more involved with “accent modification” or just continuing to improve speaking skills that I almost forgot to go into detail about the actual sounds. So I moved the complete draft goal line to the end of March because that would be a complete year from when I started writing. I’m on target to meet that goal, kinda. I now think I have more I want to add in the first half of the book. I’m going to make including that section my 300th day goal, by end of June 2022.

I had more fun than I expected writing about consonants in December and vowels in January. February is all about the connections and sound changes between and within words and that’s what I enjoy most so I’m looking forward to it. Today, I read what I had written so far in the Connections chapter and it was interesting to read it now after so much time has passed and I don’t remember writing it. It reminded me of why I enjoy teaching and helping people practice how different casual speech sounds from what written English looks like. The leap from written form to spoken form is huge, then the leap from speaking like it looks to speaking the way people actually sound is much bigger.

The whole point of this book was to write about what I found missing in so many other books, the rationale behind teaching and doing things in a specific order. At first, writing about how to pronounce individual sounds seemed like it would be boring and I’d just be repeating what is already so easy to find, but I also organized that in the way I did all the other features, taking into account cognitive load and processing.

Tomorrow, I’ll start on the second half of the Connections chapter which is the application of concepts to practice. I have a lot of pieces already in place, but not completed. I’m confident I can complete it by the end of February and begin on that last piece I want to go back and add to complete by June 28th. I’m still enjoying it. I wonder how I’ll feel at day 300.

—Book—

August - I’ve been writing the book I’ve always wanted to write about accent modification. I started in March and my goal is to finish a complete draft by the end of the year. I’m halfway there so I’m making good progress.

December - I was on target to meet my goal of a draft by the end of the year but then I realized I hadn’t gone into detail about how to actually produce each of the vowel and consonant sounds. That seems like a really important thing to leave out of a book about accent modification, but really, the books that are out there now are not very comprehensive, so I’m getting very comprehensive. I estimate this will take me an extra three months so now the end of March 2022 is my new goal. I’m really enjoying it! Besides the description of how to produce each sound, I’m listing expected pronunciation differences for as many languages as I can.

—App—

August - I’m working on making an app that will provide practice for the speaking skills I teach. This is based on practicing in small amounts more frequently to help people develop the habit of practicing. I don’t have the tech skill to make it so I’m working with a wonderful person who has the tech skills and I need to supply the language content.

December - I didn’t increase my productivity on this so I’m still not finished with the basic content for practice exercises but very close. Then there’s the assessments and audio files to make.

—Online Courses—

August - I’ve started transferring my teaching materials to an online course format. Since I’ve started writing the book I’ve been updating my teaching materials, so now I need to go back and update that same information on the courses. I also need to make explanation videos to insert into every page.

December - Absolutely no progress on the online courses. Teaching materials are slowly getting updated. I’m okay with that though. I’m putting a lot of energy into the book writing and that will be the basis of everything else so I see it as the first domino to focus on.

—YouTube videos—

August - After each Meetup (Pronunciation & Intonation, I record myself pronouncing the words and sentences that we practiced together in the group so people can go back and listen again. I get asked really good questions and have started a list of videos to make that will go into more detailed answers than I have time to give in the Meetup group.

December - The post-Meetup videos are made immediately after each meeting so those are always up-to-date. The only answer-specific video I’ve made was in connection with the newsletter about the Many Sounds of “S.” That to-do list keeps growing.

—Newsletter/Blog—

August - I’m going to start using the content I’m writing in the book to post as articles/newsletters/blogs, whatever you want to call them. I haven’t been able to keep up a weekly or even a monthly blog so this will be a challenge for me.

December - It took a while to get consistent, but since October, I’ve had a newsletter every Tuesday. I don’t know if this one really counts as a newsletter since it’s just about what I’m working on and not specifically about speech, but I think this side of it is necessary to help fuel the other side.

—Private Speech Coaching—

All of this is at the same time as meeting with my current clients for private speech coaching. I have several clients ending at this time so I’m doing the analyses of their post-evaluations right now. Each one takes me 3-4 hours, so they’re intense work for me but also extremely rewarding to see the progress people have made. It’s my favorite thing to do!

As I’m writing my book, I’m integrating the teaching materials I’ve made over the years. Some topics make me realize where I’ve relied on other sources. I always said I didn’t want my book to be a book of lists like so many books about English speaking skills are. I have used other people’s or website’s lists for years because why create whole new lists of words that have specific vowel sounds when there are so many lists easily available?

I had to go back and look at those borrowed materials again and see my notes where I deleted or added info because they weren’t the way I wanted them. Here’s my chance to make lists exactly how I want them and I’m finding out it’s harder than it looks. It’s so time consuming! I have used the website More Words a lot to search for words with specific spellings and filter by the letters being at the beginning, end, or anywhere in the word. If you ever need to cheat at Scrabble, that’s the site for you.

Maybe the time consuming factor is why I didn’t already have my own lists of words and sounds. Now that I’m taking the time to do it, I see how helpful it would have been (and will be) for anyone who likes to understand the organization and relationship between vowel sounds and symbols (both IPA symbols and regular spelling). I can do a lot more than just teaching the IPA quadrilateral. Not everyone needs more, but it’s better to have information and not need it than need it and not have it. As I’m writing and creating material, I’m remembering all the questions people have asked me over the years about pronunciation of vowels. Everything I’m including is based on explanations I have provided to questions they didn’t get answered somewhere else.

I guess I shouldn’t have regret about not starting my book sooner because I have had time to answer more questions and learn more about what people want to know.

In that time, I have learned from everyone I’ve worked with and seen them organize vowel sounds in ways that made sense to them in forms that I had never thought of before. For people who prefer a table format, the vowel quadrilateral can be easier to remember if it looks like this:

I am providing a lot of options as I write my book, but I don’t need to represent too many formats because when you understand something well, you make it fit into your brain the way that makes sense to you. It’s my goal to make the sound and symbol relationships clear and encourage people to play and create their own forms. Don’t just accept what’s in a book if it’s not the way that makes the most sense to you. Create your own.

One of the best parts of having my own business is being able to arrange my schedule which includes taking time off for vacation whenever I want. One of the worst parts of having my own business is that I rarely think it’s a good time to take any time off, especially this year. I did take a week off to go visit friends and family and it was a good reminder of what it feels like to not have every hour of every day scheduled. Ahhhhh, a blank calendar for a whole week! It felt great. Sometimes I take breaks but my mind hasn’t really gotten the message and it’s still churning ideas about work stuff. This time, I really did get my brain to come on vacation with me. Now I’m picking up where I left off.

This year has been a turning point and maybe last year being a bleak and blank year has something to do with it. I couldn’t concentrate on anything in 2020 because of the stress of the uncertainty of the pandemic. Even in the middle of it, I thought to myself that someday I’d look back on all the free time and wish I would have used it more productively and I’ll need to remind myself of how it felt to stare at the computer screen and not make sense of anything. Now, it feels like ideas got piled up that whole time and now they’re flowing out like they never did before. It’s more than just ideas though, it’s also the focus to follow through with them and create things. I did create during 2020 but it was all art because I think that it was easier to access visual expression than verbal expression during that stressful time.

I’m working on so many things at once right now but I’m excited about all of them and thinking about them 24/7. I’m finally seeing how teaching completely online differs from meeting people in person and how that requires a different way to format and present my lessons. This year has flown by and I have goals to meet by the end of the year so I’m putting a lot of energy into meeting my own deadlines. I started 2021 with the fog of 2020 still lingering in my brain, but I know I’ll start 2022 with a clarity and vision that I never had before.

Now that I’m into writing the part of the book that is about applying the concepts and practicing the speech features, I’m going through all the materials I currently use with clients and all my past material that I created when teaching in a classroom. I’m digging through a lot of physical and digital documents and finally doing the organizing that I coulda/shoulda/woulda done over the past five years….but didn’t. It’s slow going, but I’m glad I’m finally doing it. It’s making me realize how much I’ve created over the years and I’ll be using as much as I can in the book and also posting here.

It also makes me realize how far I was stretched beyond the specific area I wanted to be in for many years. I’ve taught classes I had to teach because I had no choice and because they were similar enough to what I know about, but not exactly what I wanted to do. There’s a sense of accomplishment gained from creating a new class that wasn’t my idea to create, teaching a class someone else created that I had to grow into, and teaching a class that revealed my weaknesses and stretched my sense of capability. Those are also all the reasons I had to leave teaching in a university to do exactly my own thing.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life throughout all my years in college until my doctoral studies. That’s 13 years of indecision and three years of decision. It took all that time to finally figure out that what I really like to do and what I’m really good at is a combination of different fields of study and I was able to combine them in my doctoral studies. In hindsight, it makes sense why I wasn’t satisfied with compromising that for something similar to what I wanted to teach. The combination of speech-language pathology with teaching English as a second language, plus cognitive psychology and some theater and business communication aspects, came together to create my focus on “accent modification” or whatever that grey area is between learning English and controlling English.

That’s where I like to be, that grey area.

Going through old materials brings back memories of being in awe of my mentor, Dr. Harold Edwards, as he analyzed accented English in real time. He had his forms that he marked as he listened to students making their audio recordings. I had to listen to the recordings over and over, backing up word by word, listening to each sound again and again, and deliberating over each decision. I thought I’d never have the ears of Dr. E. but 21 years later, I think I do. I make notes about speech as I have conversations with people in consultations. I can’t turn my analytical ears off when I listen to the tv, movies, and people around me. I’m okay with that. I hear a different world than most people.

I’ve practiced for years to get these ears!

I’m extremely grateful that I am now using them the way I know they will benefit people the most and that I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

Book - I’ve been writing the book I’ve always wanted to write about accent modification. I started in March and my goal is to finish a complete draft by the end of the year. I’m halfway there so I’m making good progress. I never would have made it this far without my writing accountability partner who meets me every morning at 9am on Zoom. We each write on our own books, but that daily check-in is what has provided consistency and support.

App - I’m working on making an app that will provide practice for the speaking skills I teach. This is based on practicing in small amounts more frequently to help people develop the habit of practicing. I don’t have the tech skill to make it so I’m working with a wonderful person who has the tech skills and I need to supply the language content. I need to provide more content more quickly. I’m slacking.

Online Courses - I’ve started transferring my teaching materials to an online course format. Since I’ve started writing the book I’ve been updating my teaching materials so now I need to go back and update that same information on the courses. I also need to make explanation videos to insert into every page.

YouTube videos - After each Meetup (Pronunciation & Intonation, I record myself pronouncing the words and sentences that we practiced together in the group so people can go back and listen again. I get asked really good questions and have started a list of videos to make that will go into more detailed answers than I have time to give in the Meetup group.

Newsletter/Blog - I’m going to start using the content I’m writing in the book to post as articles/newsletters/blogs, whatever you want to call them. I haven’t been able to keep up a weekly or even a monthly blog so this will be a challenge for me. I plan on getting a head start and begin writing before I start publishing them. I started the blog I’m writing right now as a free-writing experience to share what I’m working on as I work on it as separate from the accent modification information blog. I don’t have a specific point in the future identified when I’ll be able to look back when these projects are finished, but I hope to be able to document progress.

This was a good experience. Just writing it all down makes me more aware of how many things I’m doing at once. All of this is at the same time as meeting with my current clients for private speech coaching.