Breath Control for Long Speeches: Where to Breathe in a Monologue

You start the speech strong. By the middle, something has gone wrong: you are snatching air in odd places, the ends of your sentences are fading into a whisper, and you can hear yourself speeding up to get to the next breath before you run dry. By the last line, you are pushing it out on fumes.

Running out of breath on a long speech is usually a planning problem, not a lung problem. A long speech has natural places to breathe, set by its thoughts, and an actor who knows where they are has a far better chance of getting through a page of verse. An actor who breathes only when the air runs out ends up breathing in the middle of ideas, which is exactly where the audience notices.

The short version: breathe where the thought changes, not where you happen to run out. Mark your script with full breaths at new thoughts and small top-up breaths at commas where you need them. Carry one image on one breath. Speak on the out-breath and refill before you’re empty. Then rehearse the breaths along with the words, so they are part of what you have learned.

Breathe where the thought changes

When people read aloud, they almost never breathe in random places. Researchers Marcin Włodarczak and Mattias Heldner, in a 2017 review in Frontiers in Psychology, cite a study that found 96.8% of breaths in read speech fell at syntactic boundaries: the ends of sentences, clauses, and phrases. The same review reports that stronger breaks, such as the end of a sentence or paragraph, drew more breaths than weaker ones, and that weaker positions came with shallower breaths.

That is good news for actors, because a script already tells you where the boundaries are. A full stop, a colon, a semicolon, and a change of subject are all places your body is ready to breathe. A comma inside a list usually is not.

So the first rule is simple. A new thought gets a new breath. If the character changes tactic, changes subject, or turns to someone else, that is where you fill up, because the breath and the thought start together. The audience hears the breath as the character deciding what to say next.

Mark two kinds of breath in your script

Some directors treat breathing as part of the text work. A 1989 Christian Science Monitor profile of the director Peter Hall describes his actors going through every line of the play: how it scans, where to breathe, whether the line has an antithesis. You can do a small version of that in an evening with a pencil.

Use two marks. A slash (/) is a full breath, at the start of a new thought. A small tick (‘) is a top-up, sometimes called a catch breath: a quick, silent sip of air at a comma or a pause inside a thought, just enough to carry you to the next slash. A speech may need only a few slashes and a handful of ticks.

Here is a long stretch from King Henry’s speech before the walls of Harfleur:

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

To his full height.

Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1, in the public-domain Standard Ebooks text. You can read the whole speech in our free copy of the play.

Carry one image on one breath

Look at what the passage asks of you. “Then lend the eye a terrible aspect” is one instruction. “Let it pry through the portage of the head / Like the brass cannon” is the next. Then comes the long one: the brow should overhang the eye the way a worn cliff overhangs its base, washed by the ocean. That image runs across nearly four lines and only makes sense whole.

One way to mark it, as our own suggestion: a full breath before “Then lend the eye,” another before “Let it pry,” and a third before “let the brow.” Then carry “let the brow o’erwhelm it ... wasteful ocean” on that one breath, if you can, with at most a tick after “base.” The next full breath goes before “Now set the teeth,” where the speech turns from the eye to the whole body.

If you breathe after “galled rock,” the cliff hangs in the air with nothing under it, and the audience loses the picture. That is the cost of breathing mid-image: the breath splits the idea. When an image is too long for your air, find the spot inside it that hurts the sense least, and make that a tick, not a slash.

Notice too that Shakespeare gives Henry “Hold hard the breath” in the middle of that last thought. Take it as a reminder to keep the breath steady and full through the sentence, not as a place to stop.

Verse line endings

Verse speakers and directors don’t all agree on whether to breathe at the end of every line. Some favor the line ending; others follow the sense and the punctuation. Mark the speech by thought first, try it, and if your director has a rule for the production, follow the director.

Speak on the out-breath, and refill before you’re empty

Your voice runs on air going out. Tufts Medicine’s voice-care team puts it simply in its tips for vocal health: breath is like the fuel for your voice, and speaking quickly leaves little time to breathe, which can cause vocal strain. That is the trap of a long speech. The less air you have, the faster you go, and the faster you go, the less time you have to breathe.

Two habits break the cycle. First, refill early. Take your full breath at the slash even if you think you have air left, because the end of a thought needs as much support as its start. Second, let the out-breath carry the line. Start the first word on the air, without a gap or a gulp between the breath and the sound.

The ends of lines deserve special care. They often carry the key word, the object or the image the sentence was building toward. If your voice drops or thins on the last few words, mark an earlier top-up so the last word gets full air.

Build the capacity with simple exercises

Big, vigorous speeches do use breath differently from ordinary talk. A small 1987 study in the Journal of Voice, “To breathe or not to breathe”, measured four professional Shakespearean actors and found that their louder, more vigorous monologues differed from their other speaking and reading in lung volume and in frequent switches between breathing in and out. Our reading of that: a loud speech may need more breaths, not fewer, so plan for them.

A few common voice-class exercises, a few minutes a day:

• Count aloud on one easy breath, slowly and evenly, and stop the moment the voice starts to squeeze.
• Hiss on a long, steady “sss” to practice a smooth, even out-breath. Keep the sound even from start to finish.
• Take a long image from your speech and speak it on one breath, quietly, then at full voice. Note where it breaks and mark a tick there.
• Lie on your back with a book on your belly and watch it rise as you breathe in, so you feel a low, relaxed breath rather than a lift of the shoulders.

None of these should hurt. Stop if you feel dizzy, and don’t push the voice. Our guide to projecting your voice on stage has more on breath support and the signs of strain, and it pairs well with a short warm-up routine before you work.

Rehearse the breaths with the lines

Breath marks only help if they become habit. Once you have marked the speech, learn the breaths as part of the text. When you say the speech from memory, the slash should come as surely as the words. If you learn the words first and add breath later, your old breaths, the panicked ones, are already in the lines.

Rehearse the speech with its cue, too. The breath you take after your scene partner’s last line is the first breath of your speech, and an easy one to forget. In Offbook, realistic voices read the other parts and wait for your line, and you can set how fast the other characters speak and add a pause before a line, so you practice taking your breath at the right moment instead of rushing in.

If you take long pauses inside a speech, you can set line detection in Offbook to Manual, so it never moves on by itself, or press Enter or say “next line” when you’re ready.

Time the speech as you go, since a marked speech can run a little slower at first. Our free monologue timer tells you how long it runs, which matters for an audition with a time limit.

One evening to mark a speech

1. Read the speech aloud once without stopping, and notice where you gasp or run dry.
2. Mark the thoughts. Draw a line under every new thought, tactic, or change of subject.
3. Put a slash at the start of each new thought, and a tick at the commas you will need inside the longest ones.
4. Find every long image and decide whether it goes on one breath or needs a tick. Put the tick where it splits the sense least.
5. Speak the speech quietly, taking only the breaths you marked. Fix any mark that doesn’t work.
6. Speak it at full voice. Loud speeches often need more breaths, so add top-ups where the voice thins.
7. Learn the marked speech as one thing, words and breaths together, and run it from the cue before it.

Looking for a long speech to practice on? The monologue library has classical and public-domain speeches, and our guide to performing Shakespeare monologues covers the verse in more depth.

Questions actors ask

Should I breathe through my nose or my mouth?

For a quick top-up in the middle of a speech, a mouth breath is usually faster, so many actors use it. A slower breath through the nose can work at a long pause or before you start. What matters most is that the breath is low and relaxed, not a lift of the chest and shoulders.

How do I stop my breaths from being audible?

A loud gasp usually means you waited too long and are grabbing air. Take the breath earlier, at the marked slash, and keep the throat open and relaxed as you breathe in. A breath at the start of a thought can be heard a little, and that’s fine: it reads as the character thinking.

What if the director wants a passage in one breath?

Then build to it. Start by speaking the passage with one tick, then shrink the tick until it disappears. Practice it at low volume first. If it still strains your voice at full size after a week, tell the director; a strained voice serves no one.

Why do I run out of breath only when I’m nervous?

Nerves can change how you breathe. Before you go on, give yourself a few minutes to slow your breathing down: breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, counting slowly each way, as the NHS suggests in its breathing exercise for stress. Then trust the breaths you marked.