broken your favorite piece of crystal-ware? The content of communication, and the emotion that
accompanies that content, naturally influences our rate of speech. How quickly you speak if a child
is about to step onto a busy road is likely to be different from the rate at which you tell that same
child a soporific bedtime story. Observing and understanding those differences in others, and our-
selves, is helpful information to have when adapting your rate of utterance to match the content of
the story you might be telling. If you are telling a child a metaphor to enhance relaxation, induce
clinical hypnosis, or facilitate guided imagery, the rate of utterance is most likely to be effective if it
begins by pacing the child’s level of arousal, then gradually leads into slower and more tranquil ex-
periences. If you are telling an exciting, engaging tale, your rate of utterance would better reflect
the pace of enthusiastic arousal. This is simply a matter of adjusting the speed at which you speak to
the content and emotion of your story. While telling of the three little pigs running from the big
bad wolf, your speed of speech may reflect hurried little trotters fleeing from one house to the next.
Once safely inside with the door bolted behind them, the rate can become more relaxed, more re-
lieved.
- Modulate Your Intonation
There is a story of a professor of English who wrote a sentence on the board and asked his students
to punctuate it correctly. The sentence he wrote on the board was, “Woman without her man is
nothing.” When he came to collect the assignment at the end of class, all the men had written,
“Woman, without her man, is nothing.” Checking the women’s work, he found they had written
“Woman! Without her, man is nothing.”
I use punctuation as an example here because it is easier to illustrate in the written format of this
book, and because, like the intonation of sounds, punctuation adds and diminishes emphasis, at times
altering meaning and communicating very different messages.
Intonation refers to the emphasis and tone of voice placed on a word or letter. Intonation distin-
guishes a statement from a question. It may be used to put accent or weight on a particular word. It
can, as seen in the example above, cause the same words to give two totally different meanings. This
adjustment or variation of tone is perhaps more common in languages other than English. English
does not have the same subtlety of intonation as languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, but, nonethe-
less, we do modulate language to alter the amplitude of our speech, its frequency, or its tone, thus
putting greater emphasis or meaning on an expression. Using intonations, thoughtfully, can enhance
the effectiveness of our communication.
EFFECTIVE STORYTELLINGGuidelines for Effective Storytelling 27
EXERCISE 2.12
■ Va ry your rate of utterance when telling your story. Speed it up, slow it down.
■ Notice how you feel about the differences.
■ Notice how the listening child responds to the differences.