The Sound and Color of Talk

Some words on the page are alive

Reading to Ourselves

‘Sub-vocalization’ is the practice of forming in the throat the rudiments of the words we read. It is frowned upon by those training in reading quickly, or ‘speed reading,’ because forming the words in the throat takes time. Even though we don’t actually speak the words, no one can make those movements as fast as he can understand the words on the page or screen. These he can pick up in a flash as whole words, phrases, sentences, even paragraphs.

I don’t know if sub-vocalizing is fundamental to the act of reading, something we all will do unless we are trained out of it, or if sub-vocalizing is something we just happen to pick up while we teach ourselves to read, sounding out each word, syllable by syllable, letter by letter even, as we go, or if sub-vocalizing is something we pick up when we ape our teachers who read to us, or tell us tales. I don’t know how many of us do it. But I think it’s pretty widespread.

Words Alive

The consequence of sub-vocalization is that different words seem to ‘speak’ themselves aloud to us. (It might be true even to those of us who have trained ourselves out of sub-vocalizing. It might even be true of those of us, if there are any, who have never sub-vocalized.)

For example, words that represent sounds, and if spoken would resemble the sounds they represent, have a ‘sound’ when we read them: Crash! Boom! Hiss! These will all leap off the page or screen with something like a sound; the block of text will take on life from them. But the dry exposition of the narrator describing a scene, or a character’s inner state, or a sequence of logical reasoning, seems to take place in a sort of vacuum where no sound is possible. And finally there is dialogue.

Dialogue has sound. Take that description of a scene, and put it into a character’s mouth, spoken aloud, and the words now have sounds. When we read it, we will feel we hear the character speaking the words out loud.

What Lives Moves

The liveliness of dialogue, and other text that seems to have sound, helps us read it faster. Either we read it faster in fact, or else it merely seems to go faster, as we entrance ourselves into the delusion of the scene taking place before us dramatically in our imagination.

In ‘Start Fast, Talk Fast’ I mentioned how Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster in their 1904 yarn Calumet “K”, made the pace of the first third lightning-quick. There are three parts to their strategy:

1. Fast Start. In 1-1/2 pages the book gives us the problem and the hero committed to solving it. Description is held to a minimum, actions are given instead.
2. No Let-up. The events of the first third of the book happen almost without a break. Only a couple periods of a few hours each are passed over, but the consequence of the action carries us over these gaps. The hero, Charlie Bannon, must solve one problem after another in order to get the ‘cribbing’ lumber to the site of the grain elevator so he can start the next stage of construction. He does so in a continuous flow of purposeful activity. Scenes are kept brief and to the point.
3. Talk and More Talk. Dialogue predominates over description. Even though this means that some scenes go on longer than could be told in summary description, the scenes take on a liveliness that propels us through them.

The Color of the Page

There is another aspect of dialogue that helps it move, which has nothing to do with the ‘sound of talk.’ That is the amount of ‘white space’ on the typical page filled with dialogue. So long as the speeches are kept brief, dialogue will fill the page with many short lines. If we took a photograph of the page or screen, and kept the picture out of focus, it would appear as a blob of gray. A page with more letters filling its margins would appear as a darker shade of gray; a page with fewer letters, shorter lines, would appear as a lighter shade of gray. The ‘color’ of the page of dialogue is in general lighter than the color of a page of description.

This has a psychological effect on us readers. It makes the text feel ‘lighter’ in other ways than just the color of the page.

This also makes for faster reading in a simpler way: it makes for fewer words to read on a page.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, May 5, 2008)