Fluency and Being Descriptive

Fluency can increase by getting a person to think of alternate ways to describe something or an event. Fluency and descriptiveness go hand in hand, if a person is more articulate in characterizing a situation, or attaching an attribute, than he is likely to think less before he speaks or his speech will become more automatic. An increased lexicon allows the person to convey more subtle images of an item; some will say that the person has become more precise in his detail. It helps if the person is motivated enough to want to apply new words in his daily use, otherwise they will be lost. Here are some tips in getting a person to become more descriptive.

1)      If a person only knows how to ascribe good or bad to a person’s character ask them how good or how bad they regard that character. This will help to stimulate the person’s thought processes and he will become more detailed in his description with the passage of time.

2)      If a person only knows one word that relates good ask them if there are synonyms he can use instead. Advise him that there are different ways of goodness in that one may refer to a general abstraction and another a property of conduct.

3)      Guide the person through descriptive exercises where he can develop his sense of creating a story from visuals. This can be done in flash card form or just through the use of a drawing comic forms on a white board. If the images are continually add to the board, a story can be told. Later the person can be tested for recall of all the events that lead to the final drawing.

4)      Starting off with an article headline and then prompting the student to get into a story can be used in a similar exercise. Words can be thrown in to tease the participant to arrange sentences his own way. Eventually one can have a variety of stories using the same words but in arranged differently, if the exercise is repeated at a later date.

All the above exercises can be applied orally as they can be applied in writing. The new language speaker can then get a sense of how to develop his storytelling skills where ideas can fall under certain themes and he can then learn how to climax or not depending on the type of course.