Are you good at cracking jokes? Have people applauded your narration skill? Cracking a joke means performing it. If a joke is cracked well, it has really amused the audience. Narrating a story, anecdote or an incident, like cracking jokes, is an art. It is also a skill that everyone can develop. Good communicators possess this skill. Great narrators do not just tell the audience what happened but show them what occurred.
They enable the audience to visualise the scene and make them get a good perception of the characters in a story or incident. Talented narrators act like tourist guides and take the audience with them during the journey of narration. They use more direct speech than indirect speech while narrating a story or an incident.
Direct speech refers to the quoted words of a character given by the narrator. It is an attempt to represent exactly what a character says. A good storyteller knows how to narrate a story in a lively and engaging manner. Almost all great novelists use direct speech as a stylistic device to give a live portrayal of the characters in their stories.
Why direct speech? Conversational style is natural communication. If arguments, quarrels and different moments of action are presented in direct speech, they provide excitement, tension, and amusement. As each character speaks differently, it is important to let the audience know what and how the characters spoke in different situations. It helps give a good portrayal of the characters. Direct speech reveals the tone and moods of the characters. Indirect speech, if not used properly, creates a distance between the utterance and the reader’s perception of it.
A few months ago, while leading a communication skills workshop, I asked the participants to narrate an anecdote or a story or crack a joke. Those who really amused others with their narrative skills were those who used direct speech. Though some anecdotes and incidents had the potential of humour in them ,they failed to amuse the audience due to bad narration. It is mainly because the narrators used indirect speech in their narratives.
The major reason why most of us use indirect speech while narrating an incident or telling a story could be due to over exposure to mechanical exercises in turning direct speech into indirect speech. When many characters are involved in a story and when there are conversations between two or among several characters, it is good to use direct speech. In descriptive and argumentative essays, we don’t use direct speech because there are seldom any characters to speak it. English language teachers who fail to explain when to use direct speech and when to use indirect speech and who give inappropriate sentences for conversion are responsible for killing the communication skills of learners.
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk