Knowing when and how long to pause is one of the most important skills you can develop. Pausing done well gives your story energy. Pausing done poorly saps the energy out of your story. Getting the right length of a pause is harder than finding the right location.

Use a vertical line (like this → | ) between the words to mark a pause.

To find the right pause, practice reading out loud. Look for segments, for complete thoughts. Here are some guidelines:

• Use punctuation as a starting point for finding segments, but don't let it control where you put pauses. Remember that there is no correlation between type of punctuation (comma, semi-colon, etc.) and length of pause. A comma can represent a long pause, a short pause, or somewhere in between. Some punctuation is totally unnecessary for listening purposes, but it is required by the grammatical rules of English.
• Don't be a slave to markup. Don't worry about segments that flow naturally. You don't need to mark every possible pause point, only those which tend to slip by you. For example, if a word could be a noun or a verb, adding a pause marker in the right spot will help clarify what part of speech it is, even if the boundary doesn't appear right next to the noun or verb.
• Taken out of context, you can create multiple interpretations just based on where you put the pauses. That doesn't mean they are all correct. When you are not sure where the pauses should go, read that section out loud, trying different pause locations, until you find the one that sounds best.
• If it will help you, put one, two, or three vertical lines between words, to represent short, medium and long pauses. You should think of pauses in terms of length (short, long) instead of real time. A 300 millisecond break in the middle of fast speech sounds longer than in the middle of slow speech.
• During recording, you can always read a section more than once, trying different pauses. During editing you can pick whichever one sounds better.

Not all pauses are made for effect. Some are necessary to allow you to adjust your voice to a different pitch or volume (which is the real effect). If you tried to change pitch without a pause, your voice will slide up or slide down to the new pitch, like playing a trombone. Natural pauses created by pitch or volume changes should be marked up as volume or pitch changes, if at all.