“The notes, I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—that is where the art resides.”
Artur Schnabel

Legendary concert pianist Artur Schnabel’s job was seemingly simple: take a sheet of musical notation and animate it into sound. Yet if it were that easy, he wouldn’t have had that job to begin with, since it wasn’t basic animation that made him a legendary pianist, but an acute, individual interpretation of those notes.

Thus his point is well-taken when applied to verbal communication. An English speaker has the entire lexicon of words and terms at his or her disposal should they choose to learn and understand them. After all, the individual parts of a language are not a closely guarded secret.

Now, neither is the manner in which they’re used, but this requires a bit more from us. It’s one thing to memorize words, another thing to say them out loud, and another altogether to animate them into effective, compelling verbal communication. At this point things start to sound more like Schnabel’s piano, and less like black marks on a piece of paper.

In this section we’ll look at the roles of pace, tone of voice, dictation, word choice and grammar in verbal communication, and how they can dramatically affect your ability to communicate with others, whether you’re at a party, in a professional setting, or simply trying to get your point across.

More on Verbal Communications:
Verbal Dynamics
Word Choice - Grammar and Vocabulary
Rhetorical Devices
About Cliches