body of communication
Body of Communication is a collection of essays about how humans understand and use language; the anatomy, physiology and psycholinguistics of how we listen and speak, and make connections, told with the aid of true crime. It draws on the author’s experience as a speech pathologist, a body of literature on linguistics, and numerous other bodies, dead and alive, to tell stories that reflect the best and the worst of humanity. Each chapter focuses on a specific act of communication but with a felonious twist, using a criminal case or scandalous act to explore the communicative phenomenon.
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Hover over the body to the right to read more about some of the essays.
The Singing Bone
This is about the role of the larynx and respiratory system to protect our bodies, told through the author’s experience making a larynx model in her garage, and the story of a woman who was strangled in Bassendean, W.A.
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Published in Westerly 68.2
The Scream
Nearly two centuries ago in Ireland, ‘ear’ witnesses testified to having heard a murder victim’s scream. This is a story of acoustics, how sound travels, attenuates and diminishes while other things—gossip… abuse—amplify.
Writing the Material Substance
Some linguists believe readers pay little to no attention to textual features (font, punctuation, spelling) while reading, but how true is this really? This piece is about how a killer was unmasked by a text message.
Soundscapes
Soundscapes presents the science of how our minds analyse environmental sounds and speech, specifically how we hear our own name in noise—and the lurking paranoia that underpins this neurolinguistic phenomenon.​
Baby Animals
This essay explains how children acquire language from birth. It appropriates labels from a misogynistic list ranking female students that was shared to social media by boys at Yarra Valley Grammar School.
Conversational Acts
This essay-in-a-table demonstrates the illocutionary acts used by speech pathologists to assess child conversation, written with examples from the ‘hush money trial’ between Donald J. Trump and Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels
Invisible Tethers
We attribute all kinds of labels to people because of their accents. We pass judgement based on nothing more than where people come from: smart, responsible, trustworthy, outsider, serial killer.
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