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job of being a person, not an announcer. Which is not to say, of
course, that just such a display of personhood may not become
the mainstay of a radio or TV show.
XI

CONCLUSIONS
Take it that a standard in much broadcasting is that the
speaker will render his prepared text with faultless articulation,
pronunciation, tempo, and stress, and restrict himself entirely to
the copy. He is to appear to us only in the guise that his prepared
material has planned for him, almost as though he were to hold
himself to the character allotted to him in a play. And whether
aloud reading or fresh talk is required of him, he is obliged to
compress or stretch his talk so that it lasts exactly as long as the
time allotted, just filling up the space between his "on" and "off "
cues. Given this ideal, any noticed faultable may not only intro-
duce irrelevant associations (if not misinforming us), but also
divert the obligatory stream, presenting a view of someone stum-
bling--indeed a view of a stumbler--instead of a view of the
person who has been programmed for the occasion. Further,
remedies themselves necessarily add further diversion, further
introducing a difference between what was to have occurred and
what is occurring. More to the point, corrective actions can in-
trude the speaker upon us in a way we hadn't bargained for: his
plight as a speaker of words. Substantive repairs, self-reports, and
apologies--remedial acts of all kinds--thrust the person making
them upon us in a more rounded and intimate way than the role
that was meant to emerge for him might recommend. He becomes
fleshier than he was to have been. After all, the very efficacy of
an apology is due to its capacity to convince us that the person
making it is a somewhat different person from the one who
committed the offense in the first place, and how can this evi-
dence be presented without deflecting attention from the original
text to the announcer in his capacity as animator?

It was argued that announcers on small and on special-
interest stations, and announcers employing a comic format, do

-320-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Forms of Talk. Contributors: Erving Goffman - author. Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1981. Page Number: 320.
    
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