Voice Over Script Review Checklist

This review checklist summarizes tips from 3 posts about voice over script into a single Word document you can download and use yourself.

I’ve been updating all of my posts on how to write effective voice over scripts. This review checklist summarizes all of the tips from the previous posts into a single Word document you can download and use yourself.

Voice over script review checklist

What’s included

Here is a summary from the checklist:

  • Writing and Flow
    • Read aloud the script
    • Script flows well; no awkward or clunky sentences
    • No overly complicated sentences
    • Variety of sentence length
    • No grammar errors
    • Conversational tone
    • First and/or second person (I, we, you)
    • Contractions
    • Emphasis
    • Punctuate to mark pauses
  • Pitfalls
    • Pronunciation guides included for jargon, abbreviations, acronyms, and numbers
    • Numbers
    • Latin abbreviations: e.g. (“for example”), i.e. (“that is”), and etc. (“et cetera” or “and so on”)
    • Bullet point lists
    • Serial comma used for all lists
  • Formatting
    • Readable spacing, font, and font size
    • File names

Additional information

You can find all of my posts on voice over scripts collected on a single page. I created this page to support my presentation for TLDC on writing voice over scripts, so this page also includes a handout with practice activities from my session. If you want some clunky scripts to practice rewriting, feel free to use that handout on your own.

Permission to edit

Feel free to edit this document to match the requirements of your specific organization as long as you retain attribution to me with a link. If you improve this document, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks

I want to give Jill Goldman of Goldivox one more shout out for being so helpful in originally putting these posts together. Both instructional designers and voice over professionals have provided great feedback on this series of posts.

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Originally published 12/9/14. Updated 3/14/22.

20 thoughts on “Voice Over Script Review Checklist

  1. This is a wonderful checklist. NLP technologies like ChatGPT can help automate and greatly reduce the manual efforts required to validate the voiceover script against the checklist. You can give it a try with our tool ID-Assist.
    ID-Assist™ is an eLearning and classroom training storyboard automation tool, powered by state-of-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, to help Instructional Designers create effective online courses quickly and easily.
    Insert the voiceover script in a Google doc, and put the points from the checklist in the custom prompt to automate validation and error fixing.
    Give it a try and let us know your feedback –
    https://id-assist.co/

  2. In the Formatting section, might I suggest double-spaced line spacing to allow the VO space between lines for notes or markup.

  3. Hi Christy,
    Nicely put!
    One thing that a voice over talent and a script writer often needs is to know the duration of a script when it’s read.
    We just published a free web app to calculate the duration of a voice over script.
    This app can be used to estimate the duration of a narration, ebook, speech, or anything else. This the link to the tool: http://wordstimer.com/
    Other than measuring, it also allows you to collaborate by sharing a link and comments. It’s like Google Docs, but it allows you to measure how long the script would take when it’s voiced.
    I appreciate if you could update your blog post and add this information so it could be useful to others.

  4. Good basics to cover every time. And especially if you are moving to hire a professional voiceover talent to record for you. These steps will ultimately make a better performance and if the design is also appropriate (which we all expect) a more effective learning experience.

  5. Nice list of things to consider. I have one small addition to #1 “…read aloud by different people playing the parts (if more than one part).” I’ve run into instances when it was read aloud but with only one person playing both parts, only to figure out the wrong person was saying the part. It’s easy to get script writing messed up when there’s more than one part to it.

  6. Thank YOU, Christy, for asking for my input as a voice-over talent who narrates eLearning courses every day! You did a great job synthesizing all of our ideas, and then organizing and presenting them. I loved reading the series, and hope that the information is helpful to many other Instructional Designers. 🙂

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