This month, we’re taking a deeper look into some of our hypercorrection choices that muddy our attempt to communicate. When we hit or emphasize every word equally in a phrase or sentence, it is more difficult for our listeners to follow us. One of the best ways to guide our listeners to understand the meaning is to increase the prosodic (or musical and rhythmic) vocal choices we make while speaking. We want to differentiate our words from one another so that they have varying qualities in rhythm, pitch, tone, and stress. We use prosody to elevate or highlight the most important word, the operative, in a phrase. MANY GRAPHIC DESIGNERS UNDERSTAND THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS REMOVES THE VISUAL CUES THAT HELP US READ AND MAKES IT SEEM AS IF WE ARE SHOUTING OR AT LEAST THAT EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT. The same thing can happen with speech when we stress all syllables and words equally. Sometimes we dub it “the Shakespeare problem.”
When theatre students are learning a Shakespeare line or monologue for the first time, they tend to equally emphasize all words – it is Shakespeare after all, so everything must be important! Yet, even with Shakespeare, perhaps more so with Shakespeare, the operatives are key to help the meaning pop for the listener.
Take a look at this example from Romeo and Juliet:
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”
Shakespeare’s verse, most often iambic pentameter, helps an actor hear where to place the vocal emphasis.
Theatre students learn to scan the text for these clues. Shakespeare actually makes our jobs pretty easy – the meaning of the speech is clear from the meter whether regular or irregular in pattern. Both hold clues. There are books and whole courses of study in this and we are looking at one simple idea. In Romeo’s line, the important words, or operatives, are given lift by the rhythm of the iambs or beats. We naturally can feel that we emphasize: soft, light, yon, window, breaks, is, east,Juliet, and sun. Next we figure which of those helps with our meaning – usually trying to only have one or two operatives per line. We need all the words but a few guide the meaning more strongly. Try reading the line by emphasizing the italicized/underlined words.
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”
The meaning is fairly clear, right? “Hey, shhhh! Wow, that’s a gorgeous girl looking out that window. Juliet is so beautiful she looks like the sun, rising from the East!” Now try emphasizing the words that are not italicized. It’s harder to understand the meaning.
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”
The same is true of contemporary public speaking. And yet, we have found that in public speaking people often hit the non-operatives in a stiff manner.
We often don’t have meter in contemporary speech to tell us which words to emphasize, but we do know what message we are trying to communicate.
“The prices for our products have risen over the past year.”
What we often hear is all equal emphasis in a monotone or an odd choice of operatives:
“The prices for our products have risen over the past year.”
With that in mind, we need to highlight the few words in each sentence that are most important for getting our message across, and hit them with different prosodic values, to make them stand out and sing.
And a final thought: most of us do this naturally when we are chatting with friends. The shift to the “Shakespeare Problem” seems to happen when we code switch into what we assume is our “professional voice.” More to come on code switching.
