As you deliver the dialogues suggested by the exercises try to make your speeches sound natural.  Talk as real people talk.  Make the remarks conversational, or colloquial, as this style is also termed.  What things will make conversation realistic?  In actual talk, people anticipate.  Speakers do not wait for others to finish.  They interrupt.  They indicate opinions and impressions by facial expression and slight bodily movements.  Tone changes as feelings change.

Try to make your remarks convey to the audience the circumstances surrounding the dialogue.  Let the conversation make some point clear.  Before you begin, determine in your own mind the characterization you intend to present.

Situation.  A girl buys some fruit from the keeper of a stand at a street corner.

What kind of girl?  Age?  Manner of speaking?  Courteous?  Flippant?  Well-bred?  Slangy?  Working girl?  Visitor to town?

What kind of man?  Age?  American?  Foreigner?  From what country?  Dialect?  Disposition?  Suspicious?  Sympathetic?

Weather?  Season of year?  Do they talk about that?  About themselves?  Does the heat make her long for her home in the country?  Does the cold make him think of his native Italy or Greece?  Will her remarks change his short, gruff answers to interested questions about her home?  Will his enthusiasm for his native land change her flippancy to interest in far-off romantic countries?  How would the last detail impress the change, if you decide to have one?  Might he call her back and force her to take a gift?  Might she deliver an impressive phrase, then dash away as though startled by her exhibition of sympathetic feeling?

These are mere suggestions.  Two pupils might present the scene as indicated by these questions.  Two others might show it as broadly comic, and end by having the girl—­at a safe distance—­triumphantly show that she had stolen a second fruit.  That might give him the cue to end in a tirade of almost inarticulate abuse, or he might stand in silence, expressing by his face the emotions surging over him.  And his feeling need not be entirely anger, either.  It might border on admiration for her amazing audacity, or pathetic helplessness, or comic despair, or determination to “get even” next time.

Before you attempt to present any of the following suggestive exercises you should consider every possibility carefully and decide definitely and consistently all the questions that may arise concerning every detail.

EXERCISES

1.  Let a boy come into the room and try to induce a girl (the mistress of a house) to have a telephone installed.  Make the dialogue realistic and interesting.

2.  Let a girl demonstrate a vacuum cleaner (or some other appliance) to another girl (mistress of a house).

3.  Let a boy apply for a position to a man in an office.

4.  Let a boy dictate a letter to a gum-chewing, fidgety, harum-scarum stenographer.