There’s one word that every casting director, every director, and every client uses more than any other.
“Make it conversational.”
And I’m convinced almost no voice actor on earth actually knows what it means.
Hey everyone, my name is Joe Zieja. I’m a voice actor here in Los Angeles, I’ve completed over 8,000 jobs in my career across every genre, and now I run learnvoiceacting.com — where I empower the next generation of voice actors to take control of their career, no matter where they come from or how much experience they have.
“Conversational” might be the single most common note in all of voiceover. Make it more conversational. More real. More natural. Like you’re just talking to a friend.
And here’s the uncomfortable question nobody stops to ask: do we actually know what that means? Or have we all just been nodding along?
Because here’s how most voice actors develop their sense of “conversational.” They do a lot of reads. They get a lot of notes from directors. And slowly, over years, they build up a gut instinct for it. And that’s fine, as far as it goes.
But that is tasting wine and hoping to develop a palate.
Think about a sommelier for a second. A sommelier doesn’t just drink a lot of wine and hope it works out. They study the grapes. The soil. The humidity. The fermentation. They don’t just know what tastes good — they know why it tastes good. And because they understand the why, they can recognize it anywhere, and they can reproduce it on demand.
Most voice actors are the exact opposite. We study acting obsessively. We almost never study conversation. And I’m here to tell you those are two completely different things.
Now, I actually teach a full framework on this, and I go way deeper on it in a free 90-minute masterclass where I break down how to apply this directly to your auditions. It’s completely free. Register for the free Masterclass here. But for now, let me give you the map.
When I really started pulling apart what “conversational” actually is, it came down to three things — three fields of study that, as far as I can tell, nobody has ever combined for voice actors before. Let me give you all three at a bird’s-eye level.
The first pillar is acting. This is the one we already obsess over. Acting is about understanding the source of behavior — the you side of the equation. Where the impulse comes from. Why a person in a situation says and does what they do. Every acting class you’ve ever taken lives here, and it’s essential. But it’s only a third of the picture.
The second pillar is social psychology. This is about understanding what the listener experiences — the them side. Because when you say something a particular way, something actually happens on the other end. The listener reacts. They interpret. They feel something. Conversation isn’t a one-way broadcast — it’s a transaction between two human beings. And most voice actors never once think about the person receiving the sound as an active participant in the scene. That’s an enormous blind spot.
The third pillar is linguistics. This is mastering the actual mechanism — the craft. The real, physical, describable way that pitch and stress and rhythm and pacing carry meaning. It’s the machinery under the hood. When you intonate a word one way and it lands as sarcasm, and another way and it lands as sincerity — that’s linguistics doing its job, whether you can name it or not.
So there’s your map. Acting is understanding you. Social psychology is understanding them. And linguistics is mastering the mechanism that runs between the two.
And here’s the beautiful part. You already do all three of these. Every single day. In every conversation you have, you are unconsciously reading the other person, adjusting your delivery, and using pitch and rhythm to carry meaning — flawlessly, without thinking about it.
The entire goal is just to bring that intuition to fruition. To take the thing you already do by pure instinct and finally understand it well enough to do it on purpose, on a cold script, for a character who isn’t you, at nine in the morning in a padded box.
That’s the difference between someone who hopes a read comes out conversational and someone who can make it conversational every single time, on command. One is tasting wine. The other is a sommelier.
And it also solves the thing that kills more reads than anything else — what I call unintentional music. That fake, sing-song, up-and-down delivery that people fall into because they think it sounds “professional,” when no real human being in that situation would ever actually talk that way. Once you understand how real conversation is actually built, that fake music just falls away. You can’t unhear it.
So the next time somebody tells you to “make it conversational,” I don’t want you to just nod and hope. I want you to know exactly what they’re asking for — and exactly how to deliver it.
Study the you. Study the them. Master the mechanism. Stop tasting, and start becoming a connoisseur.
And if you want me to actually walk you through how to apply all of this to your real auditions, I put together a free 90-minute masterclass that goes way deeper than I can in a YouTube video. We get into the actual techniques and how to use them the next time you step up to the mic. It’s completely free. Register for the free Masterclass here. I’d love to see you there.
What’s a note you’ve gotten from a director that you never fully understood? Drop it in the comments — I read every one, and I might just make a video about it.
I’ll see you in the next one.