Public Speaking Part 2

Gestures. Should a speaker make gestures? Certainly never if the gesture detracts from the force of an expression, as when a preacher pounds the book so hard that the congregation cannot hear his words.

Certainly yes, when the feeling of the speaker behind the phrase makes him enforce his meaning by a suitable movement. In speaking today fewer gestures are indulged in than years ago. There should never be many. Senseless, jerky, agitated pokings and twitchings should be eradicated completely. Insincere flourishes should be inhibited.

Beginners should beware of gestures until they become such practised masters of their minds and bodies that physical emphasis may be added to spoken force.

A speaker should feel perfectly free to change his position or move his feet during his remarks. Usually such a change should be made to correspond with a pause in delivery. In this way it reinforces the indication of progress or change of topic, already cited in discussing pauses.

Delivery. A speaker should never begin to talk the very instant he has taken his place before his audience. He should make a slight pause to collect the attention before he utters his salutation (to be considered later) and should make another short pause between it and the opening sentences of his speech proper. After he has spoken the last word he should not fling away from his station to his seat. This always spoils the effect of an entire address by ruining the impression that the last phrase might have made.

As for the speech itself, there are five ways of delivering it:

1. To write it out in full and read it.

2. To write it out in full and commit it to memory.

3. To write out and memorize the opening and closing sentences and other especially important parts, leaving the rest for extempore delivery.

4. To use an outline or a brief which suggests the headings in logical order.

5. To speak without ma.n.u.script or notes.

Reading the Speech. The first of these methods--to read the speech from a prepared ma.n.u.script--really changes the speech to a lecture or reading. True, it prevents the author from saying anything he would not say in careful consideration of his topic. It a.s.sures him of getting in all he wants to say. It gives the impression that all his utterances are the result of calm, collected thinking. On the other hand, so few people can read from a ma.n.u.script convincingly that the reproduction is likely to be a dull, lifeless proceeding in which almost anything might be said, so little does the material impress the audience. This method can hardly be considered speech-making at all.

Memorizing the Speech. The second method--of repeating memorized compositions--is better. It at least seems alive. It has an appearance of direct address. It possesses the other advantages of the first method--definite reasoning and careful construction. But its dangers are grave. Few people can recite memorized pa.s.sages with the personal appeal and direct significance that effective spoken discourse should have. Emphasis is lacking. Variety is absent. The tone becomes monotonous. The speech is so well committed that it flows too easily.

If several speakers follow various methods, almost any listener can unerringly pick the memorized efforts. Let the speaker in delivery strive for variety, pauses, emphasis; let him be actor enough to simulate the feeling of spontaneous composition as he talks, yet no matter how successful he may be in his attempts there will still be slight inconsistencies, trifling incongruities, which will disturb a listener even if he cannot describe his mental reaction. The secret lies in the fact that written and spoken composition differ in certain details which are present in each form in spite of the utmost care to weed them out.

Memorizing Parts. The third manner can be made effective if the speaker can make the gap just described between written and spoken discourse extremely narrow. If not, his speech will appear just what it is--an incongruous patchwork of carefully prepared, reconsidered writing, and more or less spontaneously evolved speaking.

Speaking from Outline or Brief. The fourth method is by far the best for students training themselves to become public speakers. After a time the brief or outline can be retained in the mind, and the speaker pa.s.ses from this method to the next. A brief for an important law case in the United States Supreme Court is a long and elaborate instrument.

But a student speaker's brief or outline need not be long.

Directions, models, and exercises for constructing and using outlines will be given in a later chapter.

The Best Method. The last method is unquestionably the best. Let a man so command all the aspects of a subject that he fears no breakdown in his thoughts, let him be able to use language so that he need never hesitate for the best expression, let him know the effect he wants to make upon his audience, the time he has to do it in, and he will know by what approaches he can best reach his important theme, what he may safely omit, what he must include, what he may hurry over, what he must slowly unfold, what he may handle lightly, what he must treat seriously; in short, he will make a great speech. This manner is the ideal towards which all students, all speakers, should strive.

Attributes of the Speaker. Attributes of the speaker himself will aid or mar his speech. Among those which help are sincerity, earnestness, simplicity, fairness, self-control, sense of humor, sympathy. All great speakers have possessed these traits. Reports upon significant speakers describing their manner emphasize them. John Bright, the famous English parliamentarian of the middle of the last century, is described as follows:

His style of speaking was exactly what a conventional demagogue's ought not to be. It was pure to austerity; it was stripped of all superfluous ornament. It never gushed or foamed. It never allowed itself to be mastered by pa.s.sion.

The first peculiarity that struck the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his most powerful pa.s.sages appeared as if he were rather keeping in his strength than taxing it with effort.

JUSTIN MCCARTHY: _History of Our Own Time_

In American history the greatest speeches were made by Abraham Lincoln. In Cooper Union, New York, he made in 1860 the most powerful speech against the slave power. The _New York Tribune_ the next day printed this description of his manner.

Mr. Lincoln is one of nature's orators, using his rare powers solely to elucidate and convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well. We present herewith a very full and accurate report of this speech; yet the tones, the gestures, the kindling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter's skill.

The vast a.s.semblage frequently rang with cheers and shouts of applause, which were prolonged and intensified at the close. No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.

Shakespeare's Advice. Some of the best advice for speakers was written by Shakespeare as long ago as just after 1600, and although it was intended primarily for actors, its precepts are just as applicable to almost any kind of delivered discourse. Every sentence of it is full of significance for a student of speaking. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is airing his opinions about the proper manner of speaking upon the stage.

HAMLET'S SPEECH

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I p.r.o.nounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your pa.s.sion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

Oh, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quant.i.ty of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.

EXERCISES

1. 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff.

2. The first sip of love is pleasant; the second, perilous; the third, pestilent.

3. Our ardors are ordered by our enthusiasms.

4. She's positively sick of seeing her soiled, silk, Sunday dress.

5. The rough cough and hiccough plowed me through.

6. She stood at the gate welcoming him in.

7. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.

8. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers: if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where is the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?

9. Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles. If Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles, where is the sieve of unsifted thistles that Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted?

10. Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!

11. The splendor falls on castle walls, And snowy summits old in story.

12. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time.

13. The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmurings of innumerable bees.

14. The Ladies' Aid ladies were talking about a conversation they had overheard, before the meeting, between a man and his wife.

"They must have been at the Zoo," said Mrs. A.; "because I heard her mention 'a trained deer.'"

"Goodness me!" laughed Mrs. B. "What queer hearing you must have! They were talking about going away, and she said, 'Find out about the train, dear.'"

"Well, did anybody ever!" exclaimed Mrs. C. "I am sure they were talking about musicians, for she said, 'a trained ear,' as distinctly as could be."

The discussion began to warm up, and in the midst of it the lady herself appeared. They carried the case to her promptly, and asked for a settlement.

"Well, well, you do beat all!" she exclaimed, after hearing each one.

"I'd been out in the country overnight and was asking my husband if it rained here last night."