The other key purpose of markup before you do your recording is to identify words and group of words to emphasize. Use underlining to indicate the stressed word or word group.

Marking for emphasis does not necessarily indicate how to give the word emphasis. You may decide to use increased volume, change of pitch, add a pause, or some combination of all of these.

Here are some guidelines for emphasis markup:

• Don't go out of your way to look for every stress word. If you naturally read the sentence correctly (either out loud or word-by-word in your mind), then skip it. But if you aren't sure of the emphasis, that is a good sentence to mark.
• To get the correct context, you can't just take into account what you have already said. You have to consider what is coming. This is particularly important when doing the narrator's voice. You knowing where the story is heading, even though your listener doesn't. By inserting a bit of emphasis here and there, you will build up anticipation and suspense, It is especially important to mark anticipation words, so you won't forget to give them emphasis when you are in the heat of recording.
• If the emphasis is inside dialogue, make notes on how that character emphasizes something, so that the voice of that character will be consistent.

If you are having trouble finding the right emphasis, look for contrasts:

• Everyone bought a lottery ticket. John won two dollars. Mary won ten dollars.
• Everyone bought a lottery ticket. John won two dollars. Mary won two thousand dollars.

Lists

When two or more things are grouped in some way, you have a list. Let's call those things the elements of the list. The elements may be quite close together or separated by quite a visual distance (paragraphs or even pages). There is often a statement before the list, identifying the commonality: “There were six men in the squad: …” but the commonality may be stated at the end or not at all.

Your goal is to give the listener an indication that you are starting a list, and an indication when the list has ended.

Markup list elements by using L1, L2, L3, etc. in the margin. Put 'end' with the last item (L3-end). When you get to a new list, just start over with L1.