There seems to be a recent trend, and this could really have more to do with broadcasters getting behind the P. A. mic, but there seems to be a lot of combining a player’s first and last names into one jumbled mess in some cases.

When you consider the main role of the P. A. announcer is to announce names, why does it seem to be forgotten when announcing a name.  It’s almost like we’ve fallen into the world of the hashtag where we combine many words into sometimes one unintelligible blob of letters.

As an example, Massachusetts is a long, and somewhat complicated word.  A lot of double letters in there.  Now, break the name into a proper person’s name.  Massa Chusetts.  Say it so you can hear the separation.  That’s the difference between Massachusetts and Massa Chusetts.

This can be caused by lazy mouth, but also from talking too fast.  Remember, our main job is to enunciate every syllable, and that includes spaces in names and sentences.

Now, what to do with hashtags or proper names that don’t have syllables, but do have capital letters.  Hmmmm, what kind of website could we use for an example here.  Oh, look at that, SportsAnnouncing.com!  SportsAnnouncing.com is to be read as “Sports Announcing dot com” giving each word and syllable it’s proper attention.

Make sure you practice this, because even experienced announcers fall into this some times.