As writers, you want the dialogue in your story to have impact. Well, there are many ways to do that, and I’m gonna talk about two of them—exaggeration and understatement. Now, understatement is the opposite of exaggeration, but you can actually use them both to do the same thing—to create emphasis or impact. Let’s compare them and see how they do that.
OK, exaggeration. When you want your characters to emphasize a point, you can have them describe things or their feelings as bigger or more extreme than they really are. For example, your main character comes back from a very long walk and she’s very tired. Well, you can have her say “Boy, I’m tired.” Or you can have her say, “I can’t take another step.” Well, of course she can take another step, but you see, if she exaggerates, she’ll make her point in a more forceful and interesting way.
But you can also create emphasis with understatement, and like I said it’s the opposite of exaggeration, but it does the same thing. With understatement you emphasize by saying, by saying less, by saying less than you mean. That sounds paradoxical, so I’ll give you an example. From real life.
My friend Ed is a very talented cook. So last week he cooked me a delicious meal. Now, I could’ve said to him, “This food is really great, Ed,” but that’s kinda boring. Plus, Ed knew I thought the food was delicious. I’d eaten three servings. So instead I said, “This food’s not bad, Ed.” Now clearly the food was a lot better than not bad. But by understating, by describing the food as—as less good than it really was, I actually made a stronger statement. The characters in your stories can do this too.
Narrator Using the examples mentioned by the professor, describe two ways that writers create emphasis when writing dialogue.
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 466.0 578.828451883 81% => Need more words or more difficult words.
No of words: 118.0 151.265690377 78% => More words wanted. You may: choose simpler words or speak faster or remove hesitations or remove long pauses, and fully use the time, do NOT save one or two seconds.
Chars per words: 3.94915254237 3.82278263415 103% => OK
Fourth root words length: 3.29587325169 3.50058242952 94% => OK
Word Length SD: 1.91712822674 1.80425224433 106% => OK
Unique words: 76.0 92.4686192469 82% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.64406779661 0.61298525976 105% => OK
Syllable count: 145.8 182.283891213 80% => The syllable count is low.
Avg_syllables_per_word: 1.2 1.20543933054 100% => OK
Performance on coherence:
Topic speech coherence ratio: 0.0882284652891 0.0839705835288 105% => OK
Acoustic performance on paragraphs:
How many acoustic paragraphs: 5.0 4.47071129707 112% => OK
Average paragraph length: 23.6 65.8948926009 36% => The average paragraph length is low.
STD paragraph length: 12.2409149985 19.7758100068 62% => OK
Average paragraph duration: 8.98 25.5208953607 35% => The speaking content is not well organized.
STD paragraph duration: 3.96477994345 7.49434385956 53% => OK
Acoustic performance on sentences:
How many acoustic sentences: 31.0 42.9832635983 72% => OK
Average acoustic sentence length: 3.8064516129 3.78147595546 101% => OK
STD acoustic sentence length: 2.53261760341 2.94285465224 86% => OK
Average acoustic sentences duration: 1.34387096774 1.39386743896 96% => OK
STD acoustic sentences duration: 0.768969471349 0.967747756167 79% => OK
Acoustic performance on acoustic silence:(An acoustic silence means a little pause between two or more words)
How many acoustic silence: 32.0 40.4456066946 79% => OK
Total acoustic silence duration: 5.06 7.59280334728 67% => OK
Average acoustic silence duration: 0.158125 0.19053887516 83% => OK
STD acoustic silence duration: 0.118095234345 0.157467062838 75% => OK
Acoustic performance on acoustic words:
Total word duration: 35.49 46.3453556485 77% => Need to talk more.
Average word duration: 0.300762711864 0.308780311121 97% => OK
STD word duration: 0.166342289433 0.201157623399 83% => OK
Disfluencies: like hesitations, or 'ehn' or taking a long time to pronounce a word:
How many disfluencies: 7.0 8.09623430962 86% => OK
Total_disfluencies_duration: 5.19 6.56692468619 79% => OK
Total acoustic noise duration: 2.79 3.53066945607 79% => OK
Acoustic rates:
Total speech duration: 44.9 59.5455230126 75% => Talk more. Do not save time. People can talk 4-5 words in one second.
Compare to expected duration: 0.748333333333 0.992425383543 75% => Some seconds left. Need to talk more.
Rate of silence: 0.712694877506 0.681803438845 105% => OK
Rate of speech: 2.6280623608 2.53813033465 104% => OK
Rate of speech by unique words: 1.69265033408 1.55221717717 109% => OK
Rate of word duration by unique words: 2.14144829529 1.99939622689 107% => OK
Average articulation rates: 0.264269855932 0.309613076454 85% => OK
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Rates: 61.6666666667 out of 100
Scores by speech e-grader: 18.5 Out of 30
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Note: the speech e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas.