Outlines of Elocution and Correct Reading

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXPRESSION. 13. After the student has acquired distinctness of articulation and the correct pronunciation of single words, he may proceed to the next stage in the study of Elocution? Expression, which deals with groups of words, and the sense expressed by them when they are combined in sentences. In this process he has not, as before, merely to give each word its full sound; he must mould the pronunciation of each according to the meaning it is designed to convey, and in accordance with certain laws of speech by which, in a collocation of sounds the object of which is to produce a definite impression on the mind, some must be subordinated to others, and some modified so as to harmonise with those which precede or follow. Expression depends for its effectiveness on attention to 1. Inflection. 3. Emphasis. 2. Modulation. 4. Pause. 14. The basis of Expression is a right understanding of the meaning, and the best key to this meaning is a familiarity with the principles of construction developed by the logical analysis of the sentence. The simplest form of the sentence is that when it is formed of a single subject and a single predicate, e. g., ' boys? read;' and here the most uncultirated reader can hardly fail to give each word its proper expression. When this sentence becomes enlarged by the addition of an object or other accessories, e.g., 'The-boys-of-this-class... will-read ... a-lesson-in-history, the members of the sentence, though consisting of several grammatical parts, are in meaning indivisible, and in delivery may be regarded as one word of many syllables, subject to the samo general laws of expression as when the members consisted of single words. The student who keeps this principle before him, will always be in the right track for reading even the most ...