standups and voice-overs

Read through your script and underline or highlight the "operative" words - the words that are essential to telling the story.

These are words which, if you only read those words rather than the complete sentences in the script, would still give the listener the gist of the story and what it's about. They're the words the listener needs to hear to stay with the story.

Usually they are the classic who-what-where-when-why-how words - nouns, adjectives, adverbs, titles, names.

Proper names in particular always should be identified as operatives the first time they appear in a script.