PAUSE AND POWER

 

The true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,

involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall

first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning,

solve and clear itself.

 

--GEORGE SAINTSBURY, on _English Prose Style_, in _Miscellaneous Essays_.

 

... pause ... has a distinctive value, expressed in silence; in other words,

while the voice is waiting, the music of the movement is going on ... To manage

it, with its delicacies and compensations, requires that same fineness of ear on

which we must depend for all faultless prose rhythm. When there is no

compensation, when the pause is inadvertent ... there is a sense of jolting and

lack, as if some pin or fastening had fallen out.

 

--JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG, _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_.

 

Pause, in public speech, is not mere silence--it is silence made designedly

eloquent.

 

When a man says: "I-uh-it is with profound-ah-pleasure that-er-I have been

permitted to speak to you tonight and-uh-uh-I should say-er"--that is not

pausing; that is stumbling. It is conceivable that a speaker may be effective in