Sentence Stress and Pausing in Broadcast Journalism
Pete Pozner MSc
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If you are a broadcast journalist, it’s important to think about sentence stress and pausing when you read a news story, as demonstrated in this short video.
First, when reading a news story, the words that convey the most important information, which are often nouns and verbs, should be stressed to help with comprehension. Stressing them means that they are spoken more slowly and loudly, and these are usually content words that answer basic information questions, such as Who? What? When? Etc. As an example, I have chosen a news story from 2019 about the current US vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, which I found on a very useful YouTube Channel called News in slow English by English without borders. The stressed words are in capital letters.
DEMOCRATIC SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS (who?) has ANNOUNCED she will RUN for PRESIDENT (what?) in the 2020 ELECTION (when?).
Also, pausing is important for three reasons; namely, it provides the listener with time to understand what was just said, it makes the speaker’s speech overall slower and, therefore, easier to understand, and it allows the reader to aid comprehension by dividing the sentence into groups containing at least one key word.
In the same example, I paused in three places, dividing the sentence into three groups, which answer the three information questions:
DEMOCRATIC SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS
has ANNOUNCED she will RUN for PRESIDENT
in the 2020 ELECTION
You can listen to the whole news story in slow English and then at a natural pace at the following link:
Listen to each sentence for stress and pausing, and then pause the video and repeat.
A Polish to English Translator and Copy Editor Specialising in Memory Studies, Postcolonial Studies, History and Anthropology; Online Teacher of English as a Foreign Language; Trainee Life Coach
4 年Interesting, this key word groups approach. As you say, it brings out those content-rich phrases without disrupting intonation and stress patterns. So many less experienced teachers slow down almost every word when addressing lower level students. This can really backfire later when the same students have to comprehend natural speech. I can also vouch for the slow news approach (using pauses and maintaining sound patterns) from my own recent experience of learning Russian. Listening to such videos has not only improved my listening, but my pronunciation as well.