Name That Book

I'd like your opinions about naming my book.

Photo by Quentin Durand on Unsplash

This is an exciting thing to be confused about. I’ve gotten wonderful suggestions from many friends, family, and former colleagues and I’ve narrowed it down but would like to share these possibilities with all of you and get your opinions as well.

Here’s the previous newsletter about what I’ve been working on.

Basically, this book is a guide to understanding what defines an accent and how to make changes to increase speech clarity. It is for people who speak English with the influence of another language who want to communicate clearly in American English as well as teachers of English to non-native speakers.

There’s much more to being understood than pronunciation. You can pronounce everything perfectly but still not be easy to understand, so what’s next? Speaking involves how people think - about how their voice truly represents them, how good they are at communication in general, and how confident they feel to speak in a different way.

This book provides techniques to make changes to speech to increase the effectiveness of speaking English overall. The goal is to help people gain the skill to analyze their own speech to become life-long learners so they can practice with the confidence that they have control of how they want to sound.

The next book, or more likely a website, will get into the details of pronunciation with lots of examples for practice. This book is about the mindset of making changes. I can’t decide whether to focus on the “pronunciation” side of things or the “thinking” side of things since they are both relevant. I also wonder if I should be considering what words people search for when looking for a book like this.

What do you think?

What about the subtitle that can be more descriptive? I can only put a small amount of text in the poll choices so I’m making two polls to get the whole subtitles in the heading:

Or

The polls will be open for 3 days so don’t overthink it as much as I have. If you go with your gut, just based on the little you know right now, what do you like? If you have a completely different suggestion, I’d like to hear that as well! Please leave a comment or send me a message directly.

Thank you!