Great NYT piece on the rhetoric of the highly scripted yet seemingly spontaneous ‘NPR Voice’ If I could attempt to transcribe it, it sounds kind of like, y’know … this.
That is, in addition to looser language, the speaker generously employs pauses and, particularly at the end of sentences, emphatic inflection. (This is a separate issue from upspeak, the tendency to conclude statements with question marks?) A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.In a post I wrote a while back on the way conservative blogs and emails are formatted, I addressed this issue.
The observations made in the NYT point to yet another example of a community's readers shaping the style of discourse in unexpected ways. I'm fascinated at how technology pushes that process along at speeds that make the changes seem inevitable.
Read the whole article here: NYT
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