Don’t Skim Over Text. The Organization of Language: From Rhythm to Meaning

Deborah Carlson of Word of Mouth Studios has started running us through some surprisingly helpful and insightful exercises designed to make us more aware of the rhythms inherent in language production, i.e., what’s naturally produced as human beings speak.

This is actually a HUGE topic — just type in “rhythm language” in goggle, and you’ll pull up links to 100′s of research groups and labs in major universities all over the planet, not to mention links to literally tens of 1000′s of research articles and books on the topic. The relationship between language and thought is one of the main questions today driving research in the area of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.

For my purposes, however, the exercises we’re doing really derive from the foundational work of Edith Skinner’s Speak with Distinction: The Classic Skinner Method to Speech on the Stage (Applause Acting Series) — one of the very first “acting” class I ever took at HB studio — but Word of Mouth Studios has taken it all a step further.

What To Do When You First Get a Script | How to First Work Text

It would be easier to show rather than describe or tell, but I’ll do my best. Let’s take a couple of sentences from John Patrick Shanley’s Where’s My Money:

Manhood . . . It’s a job. Done right, it’s tiring job, and women have a lot to do with what that entails.

There is a tendency for inexperienced actors (like me) to make a decision about the character’s attitude, or to make a decision about what the character is “feeling,” as the character speaks the line. Sometimes this is called “making a choice.”

Too often, however, this will result in “skimming” over the line quickly because the actor is focusing on what they they “think” is going on inside the character as they speak the line.

This often changes the “meaning” of the line, substituting what the character is really doing for what the actor thinks the character is doing. The actor can sometimes give a weird or even confusing line reading because they are not paying attention to the inherent rhythms in the text.

So, what are rhythms, why are they so important, so critically important, to pay attention to in the text? They’re critically important because that’s where the structure is, where the meaning is found.

There is nothing to figure out or — worse – choose, invent or make up about what’s going on in the line. The first thing you do is simply see, observe, understand the meaning that is already there, in the line.

The first thing I do with this line is break it up into it’s parts, it’s smallest meaningful phases, e.g.,

1. Manhood
2. It’s a job.
3. Done right,
4. it’s tiring job,
5. and women
6. have a lot to do
7. with what that entails.

If you’re familiar with the work and writings of Patsy Rodenburg, you can think of this as the journey of the thought — there’s essentially one  “thought/idea/point” here, but with 3 twists in it.

There’s nothing especially technical, tricky, or difficult about this — as a native English speaker/reader, you naturally parse each sentence that you hear or that you read into it’s meaningful parts. Your brain does this because it’s an early first step in simply understanding what’s been said.

Anyway – having now the journey of the thought, the rhythm of the text, I simply apply what I’ve learned about staying on the text, and I read each part, taking an easy breathe between each part.

If I breathe and stay on the text, I’ll sound like I know exactly what “I’m” talking about: it’ll have meaning and structure. It’ll sound “right,” but not because I’ve chosen a meaning or an attitude or a feeling: I’ve simply given breathe to each part and I’ve used what I’ve learned about staying on the text in order to allow the native structure that’s already present in the text to come though — staying on the text takes me out of the way of what the language is naturally doing.

This is the start (only the start) of finding the character

You begin to characterize when your breath pattern fits the rhythm of the piece.  If you don’t breathe the rhythm you can’t characterize.  Everything will sound the same.

This is how you discover the character in the text, in the writing, and the natural structures in the text, the rhythm of the text, are the constraints the language puts on you to help you discover the character, discover what they’re doing.

You don’t “make a choice.” You find the choice that’s already there.

Once you’ve got this, you’re directable For example, the director could tell you — OK, you’re talking to your friend, explaining the “facts of life” to him, and he’s just not getting it, and you’re frustrated.

Or — say the line like your a father talking to his young son. The color of the line, the context, can change, but the basic meaning of the line is constant.

If you miss the basic meaning of a line, and you do that throughout an entire scene or play, no amount of talent or feeling will help you or the poor audience because you won’t be doing the play. In other words, the audience won’t understand what you’re saying because you don’t understand what you’re saying.

So, the bottom line. If you’re speaking & breathing the natural rhythms of the language, you’ll automatically be expressing the meaning and structure of what is said because you’ll be discovering them as you speak.

While this isn’t all there is to acting, this is where you much start. All else, e.g., given circumstances, specific relationships, etc., all will shape and color the basic meaning. Your creativity and personality will give the basic meaning nuance and color, but the basic structure remains because you’ll always be supported by the text..

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If you need more convincing that structure and meaning are expressed in the rhythm of the text, then read on…

Babies babble in sign language too — Babies of hearing parents start to babble at a very early age. Some developmental language researchers think children are simply exercising the motor responses that underlie speech production, i.e., they’re simply learning to adjust the opening and closing of their mouths to make vowels and consonants by mimicking adults, but the sounds are initially without meaning.

Other researchers, however, think that infants are picking up the inherent rhythmic patterns in human speech, and this lays the neural foundation that eventually understanding language. It’s possible that our adult brains cannot separate rhythm and meaning, so if actor’s skim the text, ignoring the inherent rhythms, not only does the audience have a harder time following what’s being said, they actors themselves are probably not fully apprehending the meaning of what the character is saying.

Dyslexics May Miss Rhythm of Sounds, Language — early thinking about the nature of dyslexia focused on a person’s ability to break down words into segments or “phonemes” as they read. Recent research, however, suggest that dyslexic kids are less sensitive to rhythms in sounds.

Other research has found evidence that the processing of both music and language understanding depend on some of the same brain systems.

All this strongly suggest that if you skim over the text, or slap an emotion or specific attitude on top of the text, you won’t be making any deep sense of what you’re saying, and the audience and the other actors won’t really understand or “get” you.

As a fascinating aside, parsing a sentence into it’s meaningful “parts” is so fundamental to understanding what’s being said or read, early AI researchers had to first tackle the parsing problem before they could even attempt to build machines that could understand human language (they called it the problem of conceptual parsing).

The early history of artificial intelligent language systems has some hilariously spectacular failures, but today, one company claims to have solved the problem of enabling computers to parse natural human language: Linguistic Agents says it NanoSyntax technology exploits the latest linguistics theories to achieve a “golden fleece” breakthrough that “was considered by many to be impossible.”

Related posts:

1. Don’t Skim Over Text: From Rhythm to Meaning Part II
2. The Structure of Language, The Structure of Thought, Joseph Papp and How to Act.
3. Acting Is Physical: “Being” in every word, “Meaning” every word
4. Oration, Recitation, Rhetoric, and How to Think your way through Text
5. Monologues, actions, breaths and thoughts: An acting class based on the work of Patsy Rodenburg

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Tagged as: language, Patsy Rodenburg, scripts, Skimming, text