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Dialogue in prose - making it sound natural



A discussion on dialogue in prose reveals that most writers prefer to make it sound as natural as possible, as if the reader were listening to a real conversation. Some writers, such as Henry James, wrote ‘like he talked, in long, involved sentences with a little murmer-mum-mum-mum standing for parenthesis, and with all these rhetorical hooks he seemed to be poking about in his mind, fumbling through the whole basket of his conversational vocabulary, to find the exact next word’ (The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 2015). Good writing should be similar to speech, is the usual advice to authors, but researchers are exploring the difference between written conversations and the real thing.

Language researchers recognise that ‘pure speech doesn’t work on the page.’ This is because pure speech stops and starts, goes around in circles, contains ums and uhs, and generally waffles and backtracks – and contain poor grammar because people rarely edit their own speech. Pure speech also contains diction and rhythm – the rise and fall of speech, the surprise, the anger, the emotions, the musings and the ramblings.

Recent research published in the June 2015 issue of Psychological Science on ‘The Sound of Intellect’ reports the results of an experiment on persuasive language conducted by the University of Chicago in America. Researchers, Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley, involved MBA candidates (Master of Business Administration) and asked them to prepare two brief presentations for prospective employers (as if they were trying to get a job) – one was a written text and the other was an audio recording. Another random group of participants were asked to judge the presentations on three criteria: intellect, the likelihood that the speaker will be hired by the prospective employer, and general impressions.

The results showed that, on all three criteria, the audio presentations were judged to be significantly more effective in enabling the candidate to get ‘the job.’ The reason was that the features of a speech, such as variance in pitch, reveal ‘an active and lively mind’ and can convey ‘enthusiasm, interest, and active deliberation.’ In the written text, these attributes were more difficult to distinguish.

The written texts revealed that the candidates ‘did not predict that they needed to overcome these limitations and did not do so spontaneously.’ In other words, the written text was not tailored to compensate for the lack of real speech mannerisms. Their written words did not sound like a person’s natural speech, which requires a great deal of technical skill and more conscious thinking. Which is why it is tough for writers to write dialogue and conversational speech. It takes effort.



http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/
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