TIP of the day: Scripture formatted for proclaiming / reading aloud

MJ. Smith

I have three Highlighting palettes for preparing to reading Scripture aloud:

1. One to format the text to read from
2. One to provide the information of stress, tone, contrast I need to practice
3. One to convert the text to the official lectionary format.

In this post, I am dealing with the first - the one that is universally useful. The principles are simple:

1. Select a passage
2. Note if you are skipping any verses to make the reading fit the time
3. Delete distracting verse numbers, footnote indicators etc.
4. Divide the text into breath units i.e. where you will take a breath or where you will take a pause. (Note a comma or line break indicates a pause half the length of the break at the end of a sentence.)
5. Underline words or phrases that should be stressed
6. Lightly underline points where you wish to have a change of tone, for example a change in speaker.

So I go to the lectionary and I see something like:

While I go to my Bible and see something like this:

1. Start to build a Highlighting palette that includes adding line breaks by duplicating the system provided Emphasis palette. This is the only way I know to create a style with the new line capability.

2. Delete styles that will not be used, rename or a styles to support the following functions:

• boundaries of reading
• emphasis
• change of tone
• optional verses
• deleted verses
• and of course the line break

3. Open your appropriate translation.

4. Set the boundaries and note deleted verses. So my text now looks like this:

5. Now I turn off the verse numbers, footnotes, cross-references etc.

5. Now add the line breaks and your reading text looks something like this:

6. If you wish you may now add indications of emphasis and tone changes leading to a final product something like this:

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Warnings:

1. In building this post I ran into 2 bugs that I reported.
2. If would be more convenient to have a simple "insert new line" highlight but I have not been able to build one.
3. You will wish to have a CNTL-Z undo function but since you do not it is safest to delete errors from the note file rather than using the erase function.
4. This system does not support overlapping pericopes. I hope that as more users prepare for reading of scripture, Logos will improve their support of the function.