style="font-size:15px;"> PractiseBut preparation must also be of another sort than the gathering, organizing, and shaping of materials--it must include practise, which, like mental preparation, must be both general and special.
Do not feel surprised or discouraged if practise on the principles of delivery herein laid down seems to retard your fluency. For a time, this will be inevitable. While you are working for proper inflection, for instance, inflection will be demanding your first thoughts, and the flow of your speech, for the time being, will be secondary. This warning, however, is strictly for the closet, for
your practise at home. Do not carry any thoughts of inflection with you to the platform. There you must think only of your subject. There is an absolute telepathy between the audience and the speaker. If your thought goes to your gesture, their thought will too. If your interest goes to the quality of your voice, they will be regarding that instead of what your voice is uttering.
You have doubtless been adjured to "forget everything but your subject." This advice says either too much or too little. The truth
is that while on the platform you must not forget a great many things that are not in your subject, but you must not think of them. Your attention must consciously go only to your message, but subconsciously you will be attending to the points of technique which have become more or less habitual by practise.
A nice balance between these two kinds of attention is important.
You can no more escape this law than you can live without air: Your platform gestures, your voice, your inflection, will all be just as good as your habit of gesture, voice, and inflection makes them--no better. Even the thought of whether you are speaking fluently or not will have the effect of marring your flow of speech.
Return to the opening chapter, on self-confidence, and again lay its precepts to heart. Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules. It is not--or ought not to be--necessary for you to stop to think how to say the alphabet correctly, as a matter of fact it is slightly more difficult for you to repeat Z, Y, X than it is to say X, Y, Z--habit has established the order. Just so you must master the laws of efficiency in speaking until it is a second nature for you to speak correctly rather than otherwise. A beginner at the piano has
a great deal of trouble with the mechanics of playing, but as time goes on his fingers become trained and almost instinctively wander over the keys correctly. As an inexperienced speaker you will find a great deal of difficulty at first in putting principles into practise, for you will be scared, like the young swimmer, and make some crude strokes, but if you persevere you will "win out."
Thus, to sum up, the vocabulary you have enlarged by study,[4] the ease in speaking you have developed by practise, the economy of your well-studied emphasis all will subconsciously come to your aid on the platform. Then the habits you have formed will be earning you a splendid dividend. The fluency of your speech will be at the speed of flow your practise has made habitual.
But this means work. What good habit does not? No philosopher's stone that will act as a substitute for laborious practise has ever been found. If it were, it would be thrown away, because it would kill our greatest joy--the delight of acquisition. If public-speaking means to you a fuller life, you will know no greater happiness than a well-spoken speech. The time you have spent in gathering ideas and in private practise of speaking you will find amply rewarded.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. What advantages has the fluent speaker over the hesitating talker?
2. What influences, within and without the man himself, work against fluency?
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3. Select from the daily paper some topic for an address and make a three-minute address on it. Do your words come freely and your sentences flow out rhythmically? Practise on the same topic until they do.
4. Select some subject with which you are familiar and test your fluency by speaking extemporaneously.
5. Take one of the sentiments given below and, following the advice given on pages 118-119, construct a short speech beginning with the last word in the sentence.
Machinery has created a new economic world.
The Socialist Party is a strenuous worker for peace.
He was a crushed and broken man when he left prison. War must ultimately give way to worldwide arbitration.
The labor unions demand a more equal distribution of the wealth that labor creates.
6. Put the sentiments of Mr. Bryan's "Prince of Peace," on page 448, into your own words. Honestly criticise your own effort.
7. Take any of the following quotations and make a five-minute speech on it without pausing to prepare. The first efforts may be
very lame, but if you want speed on a typewriter, a record for a hundred-yard dash, or facility in speaking, you must practise, practise,
PRACTISE.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
--Tennyson, In Memoriam.
Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.
--Tennyson, Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
--Campbell, Pleasures of Hope.
His best companions, innocence and health, And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
--Goldsmith, The Deserted Village.
Beware of desperate steps! The darkest day, Live till tomorrow, will have passed away.
--Cowper, Needless Alarm.
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
--Paine, Rights of Man.
Trade it may help, society extend,
But lures the pirate, and corrupts the friend: It raises armies in a nation's aid,
But bribes a senate, and the land's betray'd.
--Pope, Moral Essays.[5]
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O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to stealaway their brains!
--Shakespeare, Othello.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll, I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
--Henley, Invictus.
The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be happy as kings.
--Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses.
If your morals are dreary, depend upon
