Thought groups are another aspect of spoken English rhythm that can have a beneficial impact on your intelligibility. Thought groups allow you to organize your speech into groups of words that make up a single idea (Grant, 2010). They help your listener(s) better understand the information in your speech by organizing your ideas into comprehensible “packages” that are easy to process (Grant, 2010).

I’m a storyteller / and / I would like to tell you a few personal stories about / what I like to call the danger / of the single story / I grew up on a university campus / in eastern Nigeria / my mother says that I started reading at the age of two / although I think four is probably close to the truth / so I was an early reader / and what I read / were British and American children’s books / I was also an early writer / and when I began to write / at about / the age of seven / stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read / I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading / all my characters were white / and blue-eyed / they played in the snow / they ate apples / and they talked a lot about the weather / how lovely it was that the sun had come out / now this despite the fact / that I lived / in Nigeria / I had never been outside Nigeria / we didn’t have snow / we ate mangoes / and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to /