Konurbaev M.E. The Style and Timbre of English Speech and Literature

Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2016. — 220 p. — ISBN: 978-1-349-57827-6, 978-1-137-51948-1.This book has been written to encourage and inspire university teachers to promote a better understanding of ‘how writers write’ by instructing
their students to grasp an auditory impression of the text and its message in the course of silent reading. Living human speech is unthinkable
without voice and timbre that are part and parcel of the process of understanding. Why do we silently agree then to a proposition that
silent reading of a page without consideration of the way it actually (or potentially) sounds is the only possible way to understand it? Every
author leaves his or her distinctive oral mark in the text for the reader to discover, enjoy and comprehend. Arguably, these marks bear the greater part of the author’s attitude to what is being written or said. In fact, we are always in search of them when we try to perceive what the author is up to. It is only when these oral traces are reunited by the intellectual force of an intelligent reader into an impression of the author’s
expressive stance, then do the grounds appear for its adequate human perception. Otherwise it remains merely an assumption that can be easily
debunked by asking a person to read a fragment of the text aloud and then provide a commentary on what had been actually read. The exercise is often difficult and chastening for both teacher and student.