II. THE THEORY OF READING ALOUD The theory of reading aloud can be entirely summed up in one statement. [The reader is taking the place of the writer and simply talking what he has to say.] Literature is talk made permanent. In the pithy contemporary phrase, it is "canned talk." The objects of the reader, then, are the same as the objects of the talker. A person never talks without doing three things-saying something, revealing in his voice the attitude he takes toward what he says, and showing the motive of each word he is using as he is uttering it. These three things comprise all that is necessary for the reader to do in order to communicate the thought of the writer accurately and effectively. But since, illogically though naturally enough, the general attitude toward words printed is different from the attitude toward words spoken, it is necessary to be more specific. The instinctive and automatic devices of the human voice when used to communicate are inflection and emphasis. Inflection indicates the inter-relationship of the talker's ideas; emphasis indicates their relative importance. No one who speaks out of his own mind and selects his own words ever wrongly inflects or misemphasizes. The first task of the silent reader is, then, to discover the inflection and emphasis the writer intended. Here, as will be seen later, arises the primary trouble in apprehension. But, having discovered these, the first task of the oral reader is to find out when to employ the tone of assertion and when to employ the tone of implication. ASSERTION AND IMPLICATION We habitually use when we talk two methods of speaking words. The first is the tone of assertion: it is the kind of tone we employ when we are answering a question that calls for an answer, that is, when we are giving what we consider primary information. The second is the tone of implication: it is the tone we employ when we say something which has been said or involved in our preceding speech or in the situation itself. In talk we should become hopelessly confused as to the speaker's intention if the tone he employed for the latter were the same as the tone he employed for the former. To discriminate accurately between old matter and new is where the chief trouble in reading accurately, silent or oral, begins and ends. The task of the silent reader is to distinLT guish it without the aid of the writer's voice; the task of the oral reader is to give such implicatory matter the voice the writer would have given it if he had spoken it.] In the first sentence there is of course nothing old or previously involved. The sentence consists of two elements-the things said and the necessary grammatical machinery for saying them. The things said are happily obvious-they are at once indicated by the relative grammatical importance of the words. Only these should be asserted; the rest is simply machinery. This should be merely uttered without emphasis, as machinery is, except to the machinist, never of interest or importance save as it delivers the product for which it is constructed. All that is necessary, then, is to emphasize the chief words and indicate by inflection the relationship of the rest. In the second and all the succeeding sentences, however, there are not two elements only but three-machinery, new matter, and old matter. The new matter is the only kind to be asserted; the old matter is to be uttered in the tone of implication, that is, of implying that it is involved in what you have said before. In the new matter the emphasis always lies-that is, the idea which has the greatest importance in the set of words you are now using. To emphasize anything which should be said in the tone of implication always weakens, confuses, or destroys the meaning. Sentences consist more largely of implication than assertion. It takes, after you have started, considerable machinery and old matter to get to the new. The new material in each sentence, indeed, bears about the same proportion to the old as the part of an iceberg above water bears to the part under water; and as with the iceberg, it is not the part above water but the part below water that is dangerous. For the reader to come in strong contact with it means shipwreck. The reason that the properly submerged part of the sentence is so extensive is because implicatory matter is of two kinds; it includes not only what has been said or involved, but also what is generally expected in the situation. Neither of these can be asserted without injuring the intended meaning of the sentence. "Few and short were the prayers we said" wrongly emphasizes the general human implication that there are usually prayers at funerals; what the writer meant to say was that the prayers at this funeral were brief. To emphasize the adjectives and then "prayers" also, is to deprive them of the emphasis already given them; for a sentence in which every word is emphasized has no longer any emphasis, that is, any point of prominence. EMPHASIS When the distinction has been made between the old and the new, between matter implied and matter asserted, the task of the silent reader in getting the meaning is completed. But it will often happen, nevertheless, that he fails to deliver the meaning he has acquired. This is because he is really not asserting. An oral reader often takes away by wrong emphasis the right one he has already given-in the manner explained above-and he often thinks he is emphasizing when he is not. A person never talks without saying something, but a reader never says anything when he is merely uttering words. He must utter ideas, and emphasize the important ones. It is not the words which contain the ideas; it is the relationship of the words, that is, their grouping. Shift the same words and you get a new set of ideas and a new thought; shift the emphasis, even when you retain the old grouping, and you get a new meaning. Emphasis consists in bringing the word into vocal prominence. This may be done in many ways. The best way is the one dictated by your general attitude towards what you are saying. A man does not, for instance, increase his force in order to emphasize his assertion of fatigue. Emphasis by increase of force is the kind most usually employed, but it is also the coarsest kind. A preliminary or succeeding pause, a lingering on or lengthening of the word, a change of pitch are all, in this order, finer and more spiritual kinds of emphasis than an increase in volume. Emphasis should never be allowed to interfere with inflection, that is, to interrupt the relationship of the words. An emphasis cannot carry the meaning if all the rest of the meaning is disturbed. Nothing should be emphasized but the point until the next point arrives. The other words should be heard and heard in their proper relationship; that is all. Any emphasis on what is not the point does a double damage. It vitiates not only the present meaning but the past emphasis also. Since the emphasis always falls in the new matter, it is apparent that when you pass from one thing to another, the change must always be indicated by emphasis. Readers who do not indicate the transition are falsifying the meaning of the writer just as much as when they emphasize implicatory matter. In one case, the listener thinks they are talking about something new when they are talking about something old; in the other, he thinks they are talking about something old when they are talking about something new. To read without strongly marked transitions, is, even when everything else is correct, to defeat the sense. For the same reason, too, a comparison should always be emphasized. The comparison exists for the purpose of clarifying or making vivid the author's thought. It is something new, and in this case was deliberately selected because what he had previously said or what was previously in people's minds was deemed insufficient. VOCAL MONOTONY AND LACK OF PERSONALITY But having discovered the meaning in his silent reading and emphasizing audibly only the chief assertions, still the oral reader often fails to communicate. This is because of his vocal monotony. No voice can communicate for more than a sentence or two without movement. The ear of the listener becomes dulled. It is in reading aloud that the difference, in the general attitude toward the printed and the spoken word is most glaring. Few students would be content to talk in the unanimated voices in which they read. If they were, their hearers would not let them continue long. Every normal talking voice has movement, its ups and downs. The rise and fall in the voice is called modulation. It is dictated by the attitude of the speaker toward what he says, and is regulated by his intention in the words he uses. By reason of the artificial attitude the oral reader takes toward the printed word-that is to say, no attitude at all-he neglects to employ the movement that all voices must take when naturally used; and consequently what he says is largely unintelligible. Sometimes, however, he falls into the opposite fault. He lacks intelligibility because he exhibits movement in his voice, through his instinctive or acquired appreciation of the fact that no movement at all is unhuman and self-defeating. The rises and falls in the voice should be dictated by the conscious intention. If they are not, the utterance gets into a pattern of ups and downs, like song, and the sense is defeated. Voice movement should be impelled by false |