When I was lecturing to teacher-education students on how to teach reading and writing, there was so much material to cover I was only able to allocate one pitiful hour in the whole course to teach them the art of reading aloud. Yet I was surprised year after year by how well my students read aloud at end of the semester. They'd learned it from listening to me reading aloud, which I did regularly and often. The mere example of my reading aloud had done the trick. They had picked it up through their ears.
Expressive reading is remembered.
And so it is with our own children. They'll read with exactly the same expressive inflections as we do, which is why we should make the effort to read aloud with vitality and lots of vocal variation. Section 22 Now to endings. If anything could be more important than the first line of a story, it's the last line. Section 23 Badly read endings are the tragic ruin of many an excellent story.