0307 – 13 – A Brief Bit on Brackets (or ‘A Pause for a Part on Parentheses’)

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English - November 03, 2021 00:01 - 4 minutes - 2.73 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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2021.11.03 – 0307 – 13 – A Brief Bit on Brackets (or ‘A Pause for a Part on Parentheses’)

You will be unlikely to find these in news or commercial reads (although sometimes you might), these are clauses which may appear with brackets around them, or – just like this – with dashes… or maybe ellipses. On other times, depending on the style of the writer, they may appear inside commas.

As bracketed phrases (or those in parenthesis) may appear in an ebook narration, let’s spend a few moments looking at these structures.

These constructions are like an ‘aside’ to the reader, an added bit of information or clarification on what has just been said. Using them leads to a script which is rather more formal and flowery and this naturally disrupts the flow of a read. Usually such clauses can, with permission, be put into another separate sentence or omitted completely.

I have used several clauses with this construction already in the three paragraphs above. Take a look back and read them out loud and you will hopefully, either take a slight pause either side of them or drop your pitch as you read them. You may do both. Again, think of them as asides, but not complete sentences in themselves, so don’t go down at the end of them as you have the rest of the sentence to finish reading!

“The fire was, the witness said, started at about 5am”. “The witness said” is a clarifying clause and so can be dropped in tone.

Let’s look at this sentence from the same trial:

“The defendant, wearing a white blouse and blue skirt, entered a plea of not guilty”. OK her attire is new information, and you can slightly colour “white blouse” and “blue skirt” with a slight pause either side.

Why only slightly colour? Yes, it’s new information but it’s not germane to the understanding of the story, it is literally colour, and added ‘fun fact’. If you left it out it would make no difference to the sentence – nothing would be lost in the understanding or the telling of the tale.

“The fire, which killed more than a five hundred pigs, broke out at Old McDonald’s Farm, last June.” Ah. Now we have new information that’s both significant and surprising, so this deserves to be coloured rather more, and with a pause either side too.

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Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

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This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo