Inserting Breaks in Speech
When you listen to music, you’ll notice that the instruments and voices are not constantly producing tones. There are short pauses between most notes and longer breaks every so often. In musical notation, those longer breaks when the instrument makes no sound are called rests. Rests are just as important in music as the times when the instruments are playing notes because they help establish the proper rhythm of the song.
When we speak, we place rests or brief pauses between words, phrases, and sentences. The breaks in speech help the listener understand what we’re saying better, help establish mood or add a dramatic flair, or at very least keep us all from sounding like auctioneers.
Written word has similar pauses ...
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