Understanding Dialogue Activity
- Challenge students to find a celebrity interview.
- Have them listen to the interview and enjoy it.
- Ask students to go back and record the conversation, word for word, sound for sound, syllable for syllable.
- They will hate you!
- It’s okay.
- Maybe just have them write down 1 or 2 minutes.
- Don’t play the linguistics police and obsess over phonetics, let students write what the sounds the way that makes sense to them.
- Very quickly, in most interviews, students will notice how much “extra” stuff there is in the interview. A laugh, a sigh, filled pauses, “incorrect” speech. That’s the point.
- Encourage students to think about this perfectly poised person, who knew they were being interviewed and recorded, and just how “imperfect” the conversation is.
- Dialogue should include things like:
- Stumbles
- Filled Pauses
- An indication of a breath
- Repeated words
- Colloquial words and turns of phrase
- Dialogue is also short!
- Encourage students to notice how short our conversational sentences are.
- Even when explaining something or telling a story, the other person will make a sound, ask a question, say one word.
- This is REAL!
- Writing like a real person speaks, takes time and practice. This activity lets us observe real people we love!
I love sharing this interview as an example, because I love Adrienne Warren and because of the back and forth between Colbert and Warren. It’s about Adrienne, but she isn’t the only one speaking. https://youtu.be/BOW8WpiUSdU
J. Harvey Stone