Phrasing is a very popular speech therapy technique. It’s so popular, that I often hear, “Yeah, I know how to phrase.” And if you do, that’s great.
Maybe I can add some creative strategies to enhance your phrasing and further improve your speech. You might be surprised by what you read in this post. Let’s get started.
The Art of Phrasing
Much as in musical phrasing, speaking in phrases is an art. People who stutter tend to be rigid in their phrasing. You’ve got to break that rigidity, varying the length of your phrases and the ways in which you emphasize words.
To truly understand the art of phrasing, let’s take a moment to go through the mechanics of Breathe, Emphasize, Phrase (BEP).
Breathe: Inhale from your abdomen, begin speaking on the exhale.
Emphasize: Emphasize a key word in the phrase, usually near the end. Put so much emphasis on that word that you use up all your air.
Phrase: With your air used up, end the phrase and take a fresh breath to begin the next phrase.
That’s it. Makes sense, doesn’t it? I didn’t make this up. That’s how good speakers speak: Breathe, Emphasize, Phrase. I just broke the speaking process into three parts to make it easier to learn.
As you see, one step leads to the next, all in a smooth transition. If you skimp on any of these steps, you’re wasting your time and not getting the benefit of phrasing, which is to make speaking easier for you and more interesting for the listener.
Why is speaking so much easier with phrasing? Because when you end a phrase, you start a new one with a fresh breath. Picture your words flowing from that fresh breath as if they’re on a waterfall. Feel how easy they flow.
The art of phrasing comes in developing a rhythm as you phrase. When I first noticed that I was developing a rhythm, it felt comforting, almost intoxicating. I soon developed the mindset that the more I talked, the more relaxed I would become.
The whole process of Breathe, Emphasize, Phrase became a virtuous cycle — the more I talked, the more relaxed I became and the more I enjoyed the entire speaking experience.
Strategic Phrasing
The more I phrased, I discovered another great benefit of the process: You can vary the length of your phrase to control your breathing and relax the entire process.
For example, I noticed that when I felt unsure of my speech and would start to stutter more heavily, I could reduce my stuttering by shortening my phrases and increasing the emphasis. The longer the phrase, the more vulnerable I was to stuttering. So, if I noticed my stuttering begin to increase, I shortened up on my phrases and emphasized more words with greater intonation.
Peppering my speech with short phrases and more active intonation gave me more pauses to get my breathing into line and get back into rhythm. Once I would feel more confident, I could lengthen my phrases a bit, but I always like to throw in some short phrases with heavy emphasis to build and maintain a rhythm.
Compartmentalize Your Stuttering
Here’s another benefit of phrasing: It enables you to compartmentalize your stuttering. Let me use a football analogy: Have you ever marveled at how a top-flight quarterback can throw a seemingly disastrous interception and come back in the next series to lead his team to victory? He compartmentalizes the bad play and doesn’t let it affect him, then he moves on to achieve his goals. It’s as if the bad play never happened.
You can too, with your speech. How? With phrasing. Just as quarterbacks live one play at a time, I adopted the mindset that I lived one phrase at a time.
This mindset kept me from letting a stutter on one phrase lead to long periods of labored speech — a situation that plagued me for decades. Compartmentalizing with phrasing changed that. Stutter on one phrase? Big deal, there’s another phrase coming right behind it. Don’t let an interception get to you; just move on to the next phrase.
This led me to coin the idea: The integrity of a phrase. When the going got a little tough, I would make sure to execute the BEP strategy as cleanly as possible, with a full, fresh breath, distinct emphasis and intonation, and crisp phrasing. The “integrity of a phrase” helped me get back into gear, back into rhythm.
With this post and the previous two, you now have the basics of my breathe, emphasize, phrase strategy (BEP). This is the physical strategy I developed to break free from stuttering. Of course, next comes the psychological aspects, which are so much more challenging and unique to each individual.
Now you have the basics of BEP. The next post gives you the strategy of how to make it stick. Knowing isn’t enough; you’ve got to execute. That’s the next post.
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