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Here's a nugget of know-how to encourage you to get back to the basics of broadcasting. Today's advice: Be the duck! As any waterfowl knows, in order to gracefully glide on the surface you've got to paddle like heck beneath it. The same applies to professionals in just about any field.

Tiger Woods plays golf with such elegance it seems effortless; NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald makes circus catches seem like ballet moves; Brit pop singer Leona Lewis executes vocal calisthenics with ease; and then there's Ryan Seacrest: he may be overexposed but, love him or hate him, you have to admit he's likely the most successful radio/TV broadcaster working today. What makes Seacrest so good? He excels at assimilating a great deal of information and then dispersing it smoothly, flowing from topic to topic, and finally summing things up succinctly. All of these people have innate talent and, perhaps more importantly, all of them do the preparation required to ensure a great performance.

"I hate it when they talk." That comment came up in a radio audience focus group that was discussing on-air personalities. Upon investigation it was found this middle-aged female radio listener wasn't ticked with talk so much as with on-air personalities who keep talking when they have nothing to say. If you're going to have something worthwhile to say each time you crack a microphone, you're going to need useful material at your fingertips. That takes effort ahead of time.

Executing correct pronunciation of difficult names is another area that requires preparation. If you're going to be a professional sportscaster, you've got to nail them every time. To make a tough name sound effortless, you need to research the proper pronunciation and rehearse it over and over out loud until it falls off the tongue. Thanks to the Internet, finding pronunciation guides is easy. Sites such as Dictionary.com, ESPN, Voice of America, and Wikipedia provide either written or audible keys to pronunciation. If those fail, try simply Googling "(target name) is pronounced" and odds are you'll find a web page somewhere that breaks it down phonetically. Next time you're up against the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Major League Baseball pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, research and rehearse first, and you'll be able to toss them off smoothly. And that's just ducky!