Exercises to Improve
Transitions in Your Speech

The abrupt changes and quick contrasts made in the modulations of the voice are called transitions. The ability to make these changes promptly and gracefully is an important element in good reading.

Here are some excerpts to help improve your transitions:

1. Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn and skims along the main.

"Essay on Criticism." POPE.

2. 0, how our organ can speak with its many and wonderful

voices! - Play on the soft lute of love, blow the loud trumpet of war, Sing with the high sesquialter, or, drawing its full diapason, Shake all the air with the grand storm of its pedals and stops.

3. Ever, as on they bore, more loud, And louder rang the pibroch proud. At first the sound, by distance tame, Mellowed, along the waters came; And lingering long by cape and bay, Wailed every harsher note away; When bursting bolder on the ear, The clan's shrill gathering they could hear,- Those thrilling sounds, that call the might Of old Clan-Alpine to the fight.

4. How soft the music of those village bells, Falling at intervals upon the ear In cadence sweet, now dying all away, Now pealing loud again and louder still, Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on.

COWPER.

5. When you are enacting a part, think of your voice as a color, and, as you paint your picture (the character you are painting, the scene you are portraying), mix your colors. You have on your palate a white voice, la voix blanche; a heavenly, ethereal or blue voice, the voice of prayer; a disagreeable, jealous, or yellow voice; a steel-gray voice, for quiet sarcasm; a brown voice of hopelessness; a lurid, red voice of hot rage; a deep, thunderous voice of black; a cheery voice, the color of the green sea, that a brisk breeze is crisping; and then there's a pretty little pink voice-and shades of violet-but the subject is endless.

MANSFIELD .