reading poetry

[nightowl]

The program ignores the dashes in these lines of poetry by Emily Dickinson. (In other words, it skips immediately to the next line without pausing.) How do I get it to pause at the end of the first two lines when it encounters the dashes?

A Bird came down the Walk --
He did not know I saw --
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,


Thanks!

[nightowl]

OK. I think it must be related to the Joey voice (IVONA). If I switch to a Microsoft voice or an AT&T NV voice, the program pauses for the dashes. Am I correct?

[Jim Bretti]

It is common to see different voices sometimes behave differently in some situations like this. To get the Ivona voice to pause at the dashes, you could use the TextAloud pronunciation dictionary, and create a dictionary entry that "pronounces" two dashes as a pause. From the TextAloud Tools menu, click Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance, and add a new dictionary entry. For the Text Matching dropdown, select "Simple Text", and set the text to "--" (without the quotes)

For Pronounce As, choose "Respell", and use something like this:

{{Pause=0.5}}

You can use whatever pause value you like. The entry should then replace the dashes with your pause tag.

[nightowl]

Excellent! Thank you so much!