You may as well begin with the idea that you can sound great! Voice and Diction Mechanics: A Practical Application for Optimizing Your Vocal Expression gives orderly instruction on how to improve your voice and diction.  Using your voice and diction to its best advantage begins with an understanding of vocal variety and exercises in creating a more effective, expressive use of vocal properties.  To strengthen the meaning of a message, these practices include an understanding of an appropriate use of volume changes, pitch variety, duration changes, adding pausing and phrasing techniques, as well as reducing tension while speaking.  In addition, this book provides steps on improving your articulation and creating an easily understood listening experience.  This arrangement of material and practice exercises gives a thorough approach to successful outcomes as you practice. Your voice is your instrument, your clarity is your outcome. New to the fourth edition, is the updated information on understanding the difference between voice and diction.  In addition, we have added recordings of the author, lecturing for each of the seven chapters.  An entire section of the book focuses on diction exercises and includes audio files making it easy to access and listen to the individual sounds in Standard American English. This book helps you to practice in order to produce clearly articulated words without substitutions, omissions, or distortions of sounds. Discover how these voice and diction improvement methods can be enjoyable and most useful for all of your presentations and eventually will give you an edge on success.