Patricia Fletcher has written a smart, comprehensive speech manual for actors. She demonstrates a real concern for giving actors an idea of the importance of good speech and useful methods to obtain it. She lays out major speech categories: neutral American, classical American, standard British. Having deprecated mid-Atlantic speech because some find it "objectionable," she devotes a whole section to it. (She doesn't cover dialects.)
Her book is also a primer on the International Phonetic Alphabet, the symbols representing most of the noises you can make in English. The reader is advised not to skip this section, because Fletcher uses the IPA symbols in almost every subsequent discussion. She also briefly but knowledgeably discusses scansion. She has several good sections on inflection and how it is affected by literary constructions and even grammar.
But most of the book is devoted to a discussion of vowels and consonants and how to form them. Fletcher begins the discussion of each sound with a definition, then goes on to offer lots of practice phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, with actors demonstrating correct pronunciation on the included CD.
Here's Fletcher's description of how to form the vowel in the word we: "Form the shape for speaking the first front vowel /i/ (we) by closing the lower jaw almost completely, placing the tip of the tongue down behind the lower teeth, arching the front of the tongue high and forward toward the front of the hard palate, slightly spreading the cheeks and lips, and releasing sound through the mouth."
I'll bet you'll try this out for fun; I did. But we all already know how to say "we" -- or worse, we think we do, and that's a problem. The book can't listen to you and peer into your mouth to tell you what you're doing wrong, nor train you to hear the error yourself and correct it. There is a lot of feedback involved in speech teaching. As for voice teaching, Fletcher admits in a footnote that "vocal production is out of the scope of this text" and recommends a few teachers.
I recommend this book as an excellent introduction to speech techniques and a useful reference. But if you're a serious actor, sooner or later you're going to have to seek Fletcher out -- or somebody else well-qualified -- and yes, take a few lessons.
'Classically Speaking', Patricia Fletcher, Trafford Publishing, 2006, paperback, 514 pages, $35.95.