Top Public Speaking tips for rhythm
Rhythm in speaking can mean many different things.
- Maybe it can be used to characterise the colour and pattern of one person’s unique tone of voice
- Otherwise, it could also refer to a specific rhythmic tendency inherent in a foreign language or a foreign accent
- It could be associated with a style of speech for a specific context or
- It could also refer to specific rhetorical rhythms and patterns that a speaker adopts to highlight a key message.
A friend of mine was once asked to help judge a speech contest in Japan. But he did not speak any Japanese!
If you are brought up in Europe, you become used to different languages and know that they have at least a few words or sounds in common.
Japanese sounds very different.
Having thanked the hosts for the invitation, he questioned what use they thought he could be.
They said it would be great to point to a respected, experienced, international guest speaker on the judging panel!
What he quickly discovered was that although he did not understand the individual words, and maybe precisely because he did not understand the individual words, he became highly aware of the internal rhythm and structure within each speaker’s presentation.
Comedians will always stress the importance of timing. Often, it takes many weeks on tour before some of the jokes find their natural rhythm and start to draw a laugh.
I remember listening to a recording of a very popular comedian delivering their set before they had become famous.
You could recognise the voice and even some of the style of delivery that they became so famous and successful for, but it was not at all funny!
They had not yet found their own natural rhythm and timing.
Sports commentators are an interesting case, as often you can tell the sport by the tone, style and pace of the commentary. Golf commentators are usually whispering – partly because they are standing close to the golfers and do not want to put them off, but even so, their pace is solemn, measured and almost reverential.
Then occasionally they will burst out of their quiet, respectful tone as the club thwacks and the ball explodes along the fairway.
Horse racing commentators and motivational speakers have one characteristic in common.
You can switch on the radio or walk into a room somewhere in the middle and know roughly where you are in the presentation purely by their tone of voice. Motivational speakers tend to build up the tension during the presentation, moving from relaxed stories and examples early on to the big climax with the emphatic big ‘You can do it’ message at the end.
Horse racing commentators start the race by listing the order of all the runners in a low monotone.
They then raise the pitch of the monotone throughout the race until they reach a hysterical fevered pitch as the winner crosses the line, and then you hear the voice quickly falling back from that intensity as they describe the order of the subsequent runners crossing the line.
And finally – have you ever been in the next room when a couple of people are having a row?
You cannot hear the exact words, but you can tell who is attacking, who is placating, and you can hear the sound and rhythm intensifying until one of them storms out of the room.
10 tips for using rhythm in speaking
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Be aware of your own default rhythm
This is a slightly negative place to begin, but we need to become aware of our own little repetitive habits of delivery. One example is the characteristic tone of a New Zealander, whose voice tends to go up at the end of each sentence, so that it sounds like they are asking questions even when they are not!
Referring once again to sports commentators, who need to be very careful that they do not constantly use the same tone of voice, turn of phrase or rhythm when commenting on similar actions during a game.
Southern European voices seem to have an advantage with all their lovely vowels and precisely enunciated
consonants; to counter that, they may struggle a little more with the use of pauses and silence.
Northern Europeans and Slavic languages often have a flatter tone fall; however, the good news is that they are usually very good with silence!
Rhythm is created not just by the stress on words, but also through the silence in between.
So first of all, we need to be aware of whether we tend to a monotonous tone or a very repetitive rhythm of speaking – which leads on to…
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Fillers or ‘verbage’
Verbage (like garbage) are words or sounds of no value, that become unconscious parts of how we speak; like ending every sentence with ‘innit!’ If you do that, the chances are that ‘innit’ is going to be said the same way in the same tone of voice every time. It becomes predictable and then it becomes irritating.
I remember interviewing a young woman who ended every sentence with:
‘You know what I mean!’
At first, I did not notice, then I did notice, and then it became very annoying!
The conscious use of rhythm can be very effective when speaking, as we are about to explore, but beforehand, we need to remove the numbing, unconscious repetitive habits we have that are only going to flatten the effect of our words.
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Repetition at the end of a sentence (epistrophe)
1 Corinthians 13 tells us:
‘When I was a child,
I talked like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child.’
Unlike ‘You know what I mean!’, which serves no purpose other than filling a silence, the repetition of ‘a child’ reinforces the theme of childhood, building up a tension with its repetition, which is then released with the ‘opposite’ concept of:
‘When I became a man,
I put the ways of childhood behind me.’
(And maybe if the young woman I interviewed had continued to end the next sentence with:
‘Sometimes even I don’t know what I mean!’ – the contrast in meaning might have started to have a similar effect.)
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Repetition at the beginning of a sentence (anaphora)
As Barack Obama spoke to the Iowa Caucus on his way to being selected as a presidential candidate, he told them:
‘They said this day would never come.
They said our sights were set too high.
They said this country was too divided,’
Having set up those rhythms, he answers it with a series of
‘You have done(s)….’
beginning with
‘You have done what the cynics said we couldn't do’
A classic ‘them’ and ‘us’, contrasting the negative ‘them’ with the positive ‘us’.
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Incantation
I am just pointing this one out – it may not be right or desirable to mimic – sometimes just listen and admire!
Barack Obama and Rev Jesse Jackson, back through Martin Luther King Jnr, who famously almost sang sometimes while he was speaking, each have their shared roots in the style of a black church leader. It is almost incantation, a style of speaking that almost approaches religious ecstasy.
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Resonating words
I avoid saying ‘rhyming’ words, as that would be moving too close to verse and verse sounds too thought out, polished and no longer provides the apparent spontaneity of a speech. Rappers come closer, playing on the rhythm and sound of words like: nation, excitation, good vibration, exaltation, and know your station.
You could set off ‘knowing we are right’ with ‘the strength to fight’
You could explain that when your ideas are ‘new’, they will only appeal to the ‘few’.
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Alliteration
British Rail uses the slogan:
See it
Say it
Sorted
Not only do the words alliterate – all starting with the same ‘s’ sound, but each phrase is two syllables long
and there is the further subtle rhythm of ‘it’, ‘it’ becoming ‘ed’ in the third one
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Expanding words or phrases
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus begins his speech with:
'Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause. '
There is nothing that sounds particularly wrong with that until you hear Marc Anthony start with:
‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;’
Friends - 1 syllable
Romans - 2 syllables
Countrymen - 3 syllables
lend me your ears - 4 syllables
Suddenly, 'Romans, countrymen, and lovers’ sounds a bit lumpy in comparison.
Robinson’s Barley water had a slogan
‘For you
Your children
And your children’s children’
(not just increasing the length of each phrase, but also increasing the generations in the meaning)
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Polyptoton
This is where we repeat the core of a word in its various forms:
a builder who built a beautiful building;
a singer who sang a great song.
There is obviously an element of alliteration, but the reinforcing of the core term will also help drive the message home. When Roberta Flack sings:
‘I heard he sang a good song’ – it almost moves to poetry.
And if Teresa May, rather than repeating the terms ‘strong and stable’ all through her election campaign had opted occasionally for the occasional ‘strength and stability’, ‘stronger and more stable’. The same message would be put across without it sounding so obvious. However, politicians probably don’t want to be subtle, and therefore there is a forceful rhythm in…
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Epizeuxis
…which is the rhetorical equivalent to hitting someone over the head with a piece of wood.
Margaret Thatcher on closer European integration: ‘No! No! No!’
Tony Blair on priorities: ‘Education. Education. Education!’
Liz Truss: ’Growth. Growth. Growth!
The speaker aims to embed their message in the listener’s mind, and rhythm and repetition will tend to make their words easier to digest and more memorable.
