I’m sure this is possible but at the moment the how is escaping me.
I want to be able to isolate the lines of individual characters so that I can produce documents of just the lines they need to learn. I imagine this is best done though the Stage Play template for a project, but I don’t particularly care what the format is as long as I can output the lines for each role separately.
I guess I could separate each and every line into a new document which I then tag with the character’s name, which I can later search upon. However this seems laborious and I imagine there’s a better way to achieve a similar result with much less editing.
Separating the lines into individual documents is really the only way to do this; you could use a label or other meta-data then to name the character, pull that into a search collection and compile. I have to ask though, is a sheet of only one character’s lines really that helpful? I can’t imagine trying to learn lines without context, at minimum the tail end of the previous character’s line or other cue. I can see skipping scenes where the character doesn’t appear entirely, but you could do that easily enough already if you have the scenes as separate documents. Just create a collection of all the scenes a character appears in, and compile that.
Obviously you have a reason for asking, so I’m not trying to disregard that, I’m just curious. Your use case may be something entirely different, anyway. I’m mainly thinking of stage plays, that being my experience.
Thanks @MimeticMouton and @r6d2 for your comments. I’ll have a look at that other thread presently. I did search the forum first but didn’t come up with anything so many thanks for taking the time to do so for me.
I fully appreciate your point on needing the other cue and indeed agree with you, but It’s helpful in a number of ways which I’ll briefly bore you with!:
Firstly, I’m mostly considering this with regard to learning lines to be used in Masonic ritual, rather than a “real” play with actors. In the course of ceremonies there can be over a hundred pages of material, but this is usually separated out and given to different people to recite. Whilst there are parts with interplay quite often it’s more of a monologue so separating out the characters various sections would enable them to concentrate on their own material and performance as there’s little interplay. We do rehearse together before a meeting to get the performance together and to know our cues but it’s not quite so important in comparison to a conventional play.
An example of this, one of the ceremonies has a eight page monologue, before the monologue there’s an one line interplay with two others and at the end two more people have just one thing to do! They don’t really need the whole script in these situations.
Furthermore, I’m extremely interested in various educational techniques and learning material in a variety of ways really helps cement the content. If you’re interested then a recent book which mentions some of this is How We Learn Benedict Carey. That brings together some of the research in an easily digestible format. In short, mix up how and where you learn, rest a lot, and quiz early and often.
I’ll mostly use the individual’s lines with other tools for spaced repetition of the learning of their lines and using Clozed deletion learning too.
I also like to turn the lines into their initials and see if the performer can recite from the encoding, I’l split the line in two and see if they can recite the second half and so on.
Also, within Freemasonry their is a natural progression through various offices all of which have their own parts and I was also looking to separate these so that I would be able to isolate what someone would need to learn for each role over the years and then have a full list of what you need to know by which point in your progress.
Thanks for indulging my curiosity! I see where you’re coming from then, recitations with much longer sections. I wonder then whether it would be such a big deal after all to separate each speaker’s part into its own document? That seemed like it might be overkill when I imagined it as a stage or film script, with a lot of back and forth dialogue, but it sounds like you’re talking about something that may have many paragraphs to a single part anyway, and less of a critical script structure.
You could even split them into the different portions of a speech that you expect someone to learn by a given time, if it’s all one monologue. If it’s more a progression of monologues (they should know the first monologue at year one, monologues one and two by year two, etc.), keywords could be helpful to identify what’s needed at each level. Then you could create various search collections for the parts or for the levels and compile those as needed.
I see where you’re coming from then, recitations with much longer sections. I wonder then whether it would be such a big deal after all to separate each speaker’s part into its own document? That seemed like it might be overkill when I imagined it as a stage or film script, with a lot of back and forth dialogue, but it sounds like you’re talking about something that may have many paragraphs to a single part anyway, and less of a critical script structure.