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Guided tours offer special opportunities for lively and varied presentations that match the methods of interpretation to the characteristics of the participating visitors. Most tour guides rely on rather limited, unidirectional (guide‐to‐visitor) communication. Instead, this paper outlines six different pathways of communication that are possible among guide, visitors, and object. Each pathway offers several specific types of communicative acts. In addition, 35 guided tours in several different kinds of venue were examined to identify the pathways and types of acts that were used. The professional literature describes other types of acts, and more have been developed at the writer's home museum. All in all, the 58 different types of communicative acts described here present a wide range of opportunities for guides to communicate with visitors.

Museum visitors arrive at an exhibit or tour with their own individual experiences, memories and knowledge related to the subject -in a phrase, their "entrance narrative." We tested what happens to participants in guided tours when the guide first accesses -by two different methods -the entrance narratives of their visitors, and then makes specific connections from these entrance narratives to the content of the tour. The subject of the tour was a guided tree walk at Hebrew University's open-campus museum. Behavioral measures and questionnaires both indicated that accessing and incorporating participants' entrance narratives profoundly enhanced their experience. The enhancement was somewhat greater among visitors from the general public than among groups of university students. We suggest that guides could use the simple methods described here, in a wide variety of tour types, to enhance visitor experiences.

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