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 A HANDBOOK OF 
 PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DOLMAN, Jr. 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 i 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 HABCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U'S'A
 
 I — 
 CO 
 
 art 
 
 kO 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE purpose of this book is to furnish the 
 student of public speaking with a con- 
 cise statement of the principles he ought to know, 
 together with a few hints as to method. It is in- 
 tended to be used in conjunction with platform 
 practice, preferably under the critical guidance of 
 a teacher; for that reason it is not in the form of 
 graded exercises and assignments, but in the form 
 of a series of collateral lectures, each covering 
 some fundamental lesson which the student can 
 well afford to learn from the wisdom and experi- 
 ence of others. No subject has been covered ex- 
 
 '^ haustively, as the size of the book will show; and 
 
 '^ in most cases I have purposely tried to stop at the 
 point of greatest interest, leaving plenty of room 
 for further inquiry on the part of the student, and 
 for supplementary comment by the teacher. 
 
 ■V The book is confined to public speaking, which 
 >i to me means the communication of one's own 
 
 ^ thoughts to an audience, in one's own words and 
 personality. It is not concerned with declama- 
 
 f^OOKjJfOt I
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 tion, the oral interpretation of literature, or 
 dramatics. 
 
 I lay no claim whatever to originality. I have 
 merely restated in convenient form — sometimes 
 using- the teacher's privilege of over-statement — 
 a few fundamental truths most of which were old 
 when Aristotle and his contemporaries stated 
 them, and most of which have been restated many 
 times. My only excuse is that no available book 
 with which I am familiar presents these truths 
 briefly enough and simply enough for the needs 
 of the masses of college students who have time 
 for only one general course in public speaking; 
 the available books seem too large, or too techni- 
 cal, or too expensive, or too far above the earth. 
 Whatever may be the faults of this one, I can 
 positively guarantee that every problem discussed 
 is real, every principle of daily application, every 
 suggestion one that has been found to work in 
 practice. 
 
 I gratefully acknowledge much indebtedness to 
 current books on various phases of public speak- 
 ing work, particularly to those of A. E. Phillips 
 on " Effective Speaking " and J. A. Winans on 
 " Public Speaking " ; also to the personal influ- 
 ence of Professor Winans and many other con-
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 genial friends in the Eastern Public Speaking 
 Conference and the National Association of 
 Teachers of Speech. To my colleague, Mr. Reese 
 James, I am especially indebted for a careful 
 reading of the manuscript and many helpful 
 suggestions. 
 
 The student will bear with me, I hope, for talk- 
 ing to him like a Dutch uncle in certain chapters, 
 and for resorting in others to the unpedagogical 
 practice of talking about him, behind his back, in 
 a loud voice, for the purpose of being overheard. 
 A more impersonal tone might have been less dis- 
 turbing; but most students of public speaking 
 need to be disturbed. And after all, public speak- 
 ing is personal. 
 
 J. D. Jr. 
 
 UNivERsrrY OF Pennsylvania, 
 July 14, 1922.
 
 /
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Nature of Public Speaking 3 
 
 II. Mental Relationships in Public Speaking . . 8 
 
 III. Purpose in Public Speaking 14 
 
 IV. Motivation 22 
 
 V. Attention 30 
 
 VI. Concreteness 38 
 
 VII. Reinforcement 45 
 
 VIII. Persuasion 53 - 
 
 IX. Argumentation 61' 
 
 X. Drift 70 
 
 XI. Humor 75 
 
 XII. Vocabulary 87 
 
 XIII. Voice 97 
 
 XIV. Action 110 
 
 XV. Methods of Preparation 117 
 
 Appendix A 129 
 
 Appendix B 142 
 
 Appendix C 156 
 
 iz
 
 A HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC 
 SPEAKING
 
 Chapter I 
 THE NATURE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 A GENERATION ago it was customary to 
 , regard public speaking as an Art — mean- 
 ing a Fine Art — in common with acting, interpre- 
 tative reading, and elocution; and to confuse the 
 teaching of it with the teaching of those subjects. 
 To that fundamental misconception may be at- 
 tributed much of the artificiality, insincerity, and 
 bombast that have made the very words " elo- 
 cution " and " oratory " a terror to persons of 
 good taste. 
 
 An Art may be broadly defined as a human ac- 
 tivity. It differs from a science in that it is con- 
 cerned with doing, while a science is concerned 
 with knowing. 
 
 But human activities have many purposes, so 
 that there are many different arts, and many pos- 
 sible classifications of those arts. The most com- 
 mon classification is that which divides the Fine 
 Arts from the Useful Arts — the arts which aim 
 to give aesthetic pleasure from those which aim 
 
 3
 
 4 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 to accomplish a more material end. This division 
 is frequently misunderstood, because anything 
 so deep and fundamental as a distinction of pur- 
 pose is too much for the average mind; but the 
 terms, of course, persist, as terms always do ; and 
 activities get to be classified with one group or the 
 other not because of purpose but because of some 
 accidental similarity of tools or methods. 
 
 An art is not a Fine Art unless its purpose is 
 first and foremost to give pleasure; to give, more- 
 over, a certain kind of pleasure, namely aesthetic 
 pleasure — pleasure derived from the sense of 
 beauty; and to give it, finally, by means of an 
 imitation or representation of life in terms of 
 artistic convention. 
 
 Thus painting is a Fine Art, aiming to give 
 aesthetic pleasure by imitating life in terms of 
 colors on a two-dimensioned surface. Sculpture 
 is a Fine Art, aiming to give aesthetic pleasure by 
 imitating life in terms of clay or marble, with 
 three dimensions, but without color. Music is a 
 Fine Art, aiming to give aesthetic pleasure by 
 imitating or representing life in terms of highly 
 conventionalized sounds. But ditch-digging and 
 blacksmithing are in this sense not Fine Arts, and 
 neither is watchmaking, although the latter is a
 
 NATURE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 5 
 
 very fine art in point of quality and of skill 
 required. 
 
 In the same way we see that acting is a Fine 
 Art, aiming to give aesthetic pleasure by a con- 
 ventionalized representation of life ; so likewise is 
 interpretative reading, which combines the crea- 
 tive art of the writer with the suggestive art of the 
 reader in order that the audience may experience 
 aesthetic pleasure. Music, painting, sculpture, 
 poetry, acting, interpretative reading — each of 
 these is like life, but is not life, and is considered 
 best when it is not too much like life ; and this is 
 true of all the Fine Arts. 
 
 But in public speaking we have something very 
 different. We have, not a conventionalized imi- 
 tation of life, but life itself, a natural function of 
 life, a real human being in real communication 
 with his fellows; and it is best when it is most 
 real. We have an activity, and therefore if you 
 like, an art; but a Useful Art, not a Fine Art. 
 Fine it may be in some respects, like watch-mak- 
 ing or diplomacy — for the Useful Arts may be 
 fine and the Fine Arts may be useful — but a 
 Fine Art, like music, painting, or acting, it posi- 
 tively is not. 
 
 All of this is perfectly simple and obvious,
 
 6 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 which is why I set it down, for in our present 
 chaotic state of education it is precisely the 
 simple and obvious things that students do not 
 seem to grasp. I know from daily experience that 
 there is much confusion of mind concerning the 
 nature of public speaking; and those unfortu- 
 nates who as little children were made to " speak 
 pieces " in Sunday school, and a little later to re- 
 cite before the high school at assembly some gem 
 from " One Hundred Choice Selections " under the 
 impression that that agonizing performance con- 
 stituted public speaking — those people, I say, 
 will be doing very well indeed if they can get into 
 their poor muddled heads a rational notion of 
 what public speaking really is. 
 
 I know a man who can not. He is a successful 
 business executive, forty-five years of age, tre- 
 mendously capable, with a brain full of ideas, an 
 engaging personality, a good voice and manner, 
 and a perfect command of his tongue — in private. 
 He can talk fluently and powerfully to two or 
 three or a half dozen serious-minded men sitting 
 about a directors' table, and carry his point. But 
 ask him to appear in public and " make a speech " 
 (using those words) and he suddenly becomes 
 idiotically self-conscious.
 
 NATURE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 7 
 
 " Oh, I can't make a speech," he says, giggling 
 foohshly. " You mustn't ask me, really." 
 
 And if you are wise you won't, for the truth is 
 he can't. The reason is that he thinks public 
 speaking is an Art — a thing like music or sculp- 
 ture, that calls for a special gift, years of drill, a 
 masterly technique, an artistic soul; a thing es- 
 sentially artificial, mysteriously unreal, only to 
 be successfully performed by a temperamental 
 genius — a talker rather than a doer. In short 
 he thinks of public speaking as an abnormal, not 
 a normal, thing. No wonder it scares him. 
 
 Will he get over it? Probably not. At his age 
 muddle-headedness tends to freeze up and be- 
 come permanent; the more a man learns the 
 harder it is for him to discern through the mists 
 of knowledge the simple truths and basic distinc- 
 tions that he has missed. 
 
 But young men, and women, may profit by his 
 example, and to them I dedicate these remarks.
 
 Chapter II 
 
 MENTAL RELATIONSHIPS IN PUBLIC 
 
 SPEAKING 
 
 WHEN I ask a student speaker what his 
 purpose is, in nine cases out of ten he 
 answers: " To tell about Lincoln " (or " the war," 
 or " the tariff," or whatever his subject happens 
 to be). He does not say, "To tell you about 
 Lincoln," or " To tell them about Lincoln." He 
 uses the transitive verb " tell " without a direct 
 object. 
 
 He does this because he is not thinking about 
 his audience at all; he is thinking about himself 
 and his subject matter, and how to get it off his 
 chest. He can do this while staring at the ceiling, 
 or the wall, or out of the window, and he can do 
 it just as well — perhaps better — when no audi- 
 ence is present. 
 
 This is not public speaking. Nobody can pos- 
 sibly speak well when he thinks of himself and his 
 subject and ignores his audience. He may 
 
 8
 
 MENTAL RELATIONSHIPS 9 
 
 imagine he is speaking well; he may be express- 
 ing himself beautifully. But beautiful self-ex- 
 pression is not the thing, unless one's stenographer 
 be his sole audience — and I know some people 
 who can put even their stenographers to sleep. 
 Not power to express one's self, but power to im- 
 press one's audience is the measure of effective- 
 ness in a public speaker. 
 
 Good speaking, whether public or private, is 
 communication. The word means the act of shar- 
 ing something with others; it comes from the 
 Latin con (with) and munus (a business), through 
 communis (common) and communico (to confer 
 or consult with one another) . In English we add 
 another " with," and say that a speaker com- 
 municates with his audience. This double in- 
 sistence on the " with " should serve to remind 
 the student of the common or reciprocal nature of 
 the act involved in communication ; but of course 
 it doesn't, because in these days of unassociative 
 fact education and abolition of " useless " studies 
 like Latin, nothing ever reminds a student of 
 anything. 
 
 In order to understand this reciprocal quality 
 the student should think of what happens when 
 two persons converse. Both are parties to the con-
 
 10 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 versation ; neither is passive ; each gives his active 
 attention to the other, and experiences a sense of 
 direct mental contact with him; and there is a 
 spirit of give and take that is by no means lost 
 when one person happens to have a little more 
 to say than the other. 
 
 We are all accustomed to conversing in this 
 manner, and most of us do it without discomfort 
 and with reasonable effectiveness every day. We 
 find it just as easy to talk to two or three, or a 
 half dozen, so long as the atmosphere is that of 
 private conversation; but the moment somebody 
 says " public speaking " we go all to pieces, as if 
 the situation had suddenly become different and 
 quite unfamiliar. This is the heart of the prob- 
 lem, and the student who would speak effectively 
 must positively learn that the essential mental 
 relationship between the speaker and his audi- 
 ence is always the same, no matter how large 
 or small the audience, or how formal or informal 
 the occasion. 
 
 I have not said, of course, that the speaker's 
 manner is always the same, or that it should be. 
 Obviously it should not. It should vary to suit 
 the situation and circumstances. Necessity and 
 good taste will dictate appropriate modifications
 
 MENTAL RELATIONSHIPS 11 
 
 of posture, gesture, voice, vocabulary, phrase- 
 ology, and force. But these modifications are 
 quantitative rather than qualitative ; they merely 
 alter the scale of the speech in proportion to the 
 formality of the occasion. Just how large an audi- 
 ence calls for a really public style is a matter of 
 opinion; one speaker of my acquaintance says 
 that to him thirty people constitute an audience ; 
 another says twenty, and another twelve. In 
 any case circumstances will alter the number; one 
 might speak more formally to six people at one 
 time than to sixty at another. 
 
 The earnest student will find much to occupy 
 him in the study of these modifications of style, 
 but his time will be wasted if he does not first 
 grasp the fact that public speaking is simply ex- 
 panded conversation ; that the difference between 
 public and private speaking is a difference of de- 
 gree only — a difference without a distinction ; 
 that in all speaking, public or private, the true re- 
 lationship of speaker to audience is the same. 
 
 The relationship must be direct, reciprocal, and 
 sincere. 
 
 It must be direct in the sense that there must 
 be no barrier of distance or remoteness between 
 speaker and audience; there must be no dreamy
 
 12 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 look on the speaker's face, no far-away tone in 
 his voice; he must be mentally in contact with 
 his audience. 
 
 It must be reciprocal in the sense that there 
 must be response from the audience, expected and 
 given, not necessarily in words, or even in laughter 
 or applause; perhaps only in active attention and 
 understanding; but nevertheless response. The 
 speaker must be continually anticipating and 
 answering the unspoken question, or meeting the 
 unspoken objection. 
 
 It must be sincere, not merely in the moral 
 but in the intellectual sense. It is not enough 
 that the speaker shall have an honest purpose; 
 he must be natural and genuine; his intellectual 
 processes must be real and spontaneous, no mat- 
 ter how well prepared, and he must be free of 
 artificiality or pretense. Only thus can he avoid 
 setting up barriers between himself and his audi- 
 ence, destroying their attention and stimulating 
 in himself the very " nervousness " he is so anxious 
 to allay. 
 
 That so-called " nervousness " is after all the 
 chief problem with most students of public speak- 
 ing. I have hardly ever met a student who did 
 not assert that his object in taking the public
 
 MENTAL RELATIONSHIPS 13 
 
 speaking course was " to overcome nervousness." 
 It seems to him that that is all there is to public 
 speaking. 
 
 " I'd be all right," he says, " if I could only get 
 over my nervousness. I know what I want to 
 say, but when I get up there on the platform I 
 get all confused; I can't think on my feet, and I 
 can't say what I want to say at all. How can I 
 overcome that? " 
 
 My answer is that practice will tend to cure 
 the ailment, but only with the aid of a clear under- 
 standing of the nature of public speaking, and of 
 the mental relationship between speaker and 
 audience.
 
 Chapter III 
 PURPOSE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 A CERTAIN type of student speaker is like 
 the man in the old song with the blithe 
 refrain : " I don't know where I'm going, but I'm 
 on my way." He has no goal, no objective, but 
 he goes ahead just the same. 
 
 Ask him what his purpose is, and as I have 
 already remarked he will look vaguely about and 
 say, " Why — er — to tell about so-and-so " — 
 mentioning his subject, not his purpose. Rare in- 
 deed is the genius who answers unhesitatingly, 
 " To convince the class that such-and-such a 
 measure would be wise," or, " To entertain my 
 audience with an account of some personal ad- 
 ventures." 
 
 Yet it ought to be obvious that in public speak- 
 ing as in other things a clear fixed purpose is es- 
 sential if one is to stand a reasonable chance of 
 accomplishing it. 
 
 Absence of a clear purpose is a habit with 
 
 14
 
 PURPOSE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 15 
 
 twentieth century Americans. Rapidity and com- 
 plexity of life lead naturally to confusion, haste, 
 superficiality and muddle-headedness ; and with 
 these goes vagueness of purpose. 
 
 If the student speaker is to overcome the habit 
 in his own case he must first learn by analysis 
 what the possible purposes of a speaker are, and 
 then so govern himself that he never speaks ex- 
 cept with one of those purposes definitely and 
 dominantly in mind. 
 
 Remembering that purpose in a speaker is to 
 be considered in terms of what he is trying to do 
 to the audience, we may fairly say that the pos- 
 sible purposes are: 
 
 1. To inform 
 
 2. To enlighten 
 
 3. To convince 
 
 4. To impress 
 
 5. To excite 
 
 6. To actuate 
 
 7. To entertain 
 
 Note that each of these is presented in the form 
 of a transitive verb to which the words " the audi- 
 ence " may be added as direct object. 
 
 The classification is arbitrary, of course. Other 
 writers divide differently, or use different terms;
 
 16 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 some combine numbers 1 and 2, or 4 and 5, or 5 
 and 6. The student may very well analyze for 
 himself, choosing his own terms. The essential 
 thing is that he shall have some rational classi- 
 fication sufficiently comprehensive to include all 
 possible purposes of the speaker, and that he shall 
 use it. 
 
 Assuming that he wishes — by reason either of 
 laziness or superior intelligence — to use the one 
 I offer him, let me explain it seriatim. 
 
 1. To inform. The speaker's purpose is to in- 
 form when he seeks primarily to furnish his 
 hearers with facts, especially with facts new to 
 them; when he aims to increase their knowledge 
 as distinct from their understanding. His effort 
 is directed at the recording function of the mind 
 — at the memory, if you like ; and the measure of 
 success is qualitative. A teacher giving out the 
 multiplication table is an example; or one giving 
 out the names of the continents ; or a returned ex- 
 plorer recounting his discoveries. But a teacher 
 explaining the principles of long division would 
 not be an example — not in the narrow sense in 
 which the word " inform " is here used. 
 
 2. To enlighten. The speaker's purpose is to 
 enlighten when he aims to clear up some difficulty
 
 PURPOSE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 17 
 
 of comprehension ; to present, not necessarily new 
 facts, but a new view of the relationship of facts; 
 to improve his hearers' understanding of a given 
 subject rather than to increase their knowledge; 
 in other words, to explain something to them. 
 The teacher explaining long division would be an 
 example of this; or Mr. Einstein expounding his 
 theory of relativity; or a football coach giving a 
 blackboard demonstration of a complicated play. 
 Note again the narrow meaning of the word for 
 purposes of distinction. 
 
 3. To convince. The speaker's purpose is to 
 convince when he seeks to make his audience be- 
 lieve a debatable assertion, accept a statement 
 as true, or adopt an opinion. It is not knowledge 
 or understanding that he seeks, but agreement; 
 though he may use knowledge or understanding as 
 a means to that end. The legislator supporting 
 a bill ; the attorney arguing a point at law before 
 a judge; the sincere propagandist seeking con- 
 verts to a new " ism," — these are examples. But 
 the contentious " chronic kicker," the political 
 mud-slinger, the fire-eating orator denouncing his 
 enemies and laying down the law, are not, for 
 they are making no sincere attempt to convince. 
 
 4. To impress. The speaker's purpose is to
 
 18 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 impress when he seeks to bring to his hearers a 
 new and deeper realization of a truth, perhaps an 
 old truth already known to them; not to make 
 them know it, or understand it merely, but to 
 make them feel it, and feel it deeply; to sear it 
 into their souls by challenging attention, appeal- 
 ing to the sympathies, and associating emotion 
 with thought. The patriotic orator repeating the 
 familiar message of the life of Washington, or 
 Lincoln, as a source of inspiration to his hearers; 
 the preacher striving to tell the old old Christmas 
 story in such a way as to awaken new reverence of 
 spirit in his congregation; the college president 
 bidding farewell to the senior class in old but hal- 
 lowed words, — all these are examples. 
 
 5. To excite. The speaker's purpose is to ex- 
 cite when he seeks to reach the more direct and 
 more tempestuous emotional reactions in his audi- 
 ence ; to arouse such emotions as fear, hatred, in- 
 dignation, enthusiasm, hilarity, pugnacity — not 
 as a means to an end but as an end in itself. To 
 excite is the least worthy purpose, though not 
 the least common. It is the purpose of the worst 
 type of mob orator, the agitator, the spellbinder. 
 Its independence of other purposes is the meas- 
 ure of its un worthiness: as a means to other ends
 
 PURPOSE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 19 
 
 it may at times be justifiable. Closely associated 
 with the purpose to impress, it differs from it in 
 that it appeals to the emotions alone, while to im- 
 press appeals to the emotions and thoughts har- 
 moniously combined. To impress implies a 
 strengthening of the spiritual control of the lis- 
 tener; to excite implies a weakening. 
 
 6. To actuate. The speaker's purpose is to 
 actuate when he aims not merely to plant beliefs 
 or impressions that may later work out into ac- 
 tions, but to move his hearers to some definite 
 act, — particularly some act to be performed at 
 the time and place of the speech, or very soon 
 after. The appeal may be emotional, perhaps 
 following excitation; or it may be intellectual, 
 perhaps following conviction ; or it may be a com- 
 bination of both. People who are convinced of a 
 truth do not always get round to act upon their 
 convictions; it is often necessary to add persua- 
 sion — that is, to arouse their emotions in such a 
 way as to overcome their natural inertia and pro- 
 vide a motive force. Examples may be found 
 in the political speaker urging his party constitu- 
 ents to come out and vote : the missionary appeal- 
 ing for funds; the recruiting officer in war time 
 exhorting a crowd of men to enlist.
 
 20 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 7. To entertain. The speaker's purpose is to 
 entertain when he has no other object than to 
 give his hearers pleasure/ The pleasure may be 
 of a mirthful or a sober kind: entertainment does 
 not necessarily imply hilarity. Some writers use 
 the term " to interest " in this same sense ; it is 
 perhaps a broader term, but seems to me to sug- 
 gest a means rather than a purpose. Of examples, 
 the commonest is the after-dinner speech ; a more 
 sober one is the Chautauqua or University Exten- 
 sion lecture of the type purporting to be educa- 
 tional, but really primarily intended to entertain. 
 
 Such are the possible purposes of a speaker. 
 Clearly one of them must dominate every speech 
 if the speech is to have unity, for unity is simply 
 singleness of purpose. 
 
 Other purposes may enter into a speech as 
 contributing or subordinate elements; or a speech 
 may have both an immediate and an ultimate 
 purpose. The student should keep clearly in 
 mind the difference between a means and an end ; 
 between a contributory and a dominant purpose. 
 
 1 The purpose of entertainment brings public speaking 
 nearer the Fine Arts than any other purpose (see Chapter I) ; 
 but it is possible to distinguish between a communication of 
 ideas for the purpose of entertaining, and an oral interpre- 
 tation of an entertaining discourse. There is no real need 
 for confusion.
 
 PURPOSE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING 21 
 
 He should realize that one may have many uni- 
 ties within a unity. A novel, for instance, may 
 have ten chapters, four of which are informative 
 in purpose, three entertaining, two impressive, 
 and one enlightening; yet the purpose of the 
 whole may be to convince. The unity of purpose 
 of the whole novel is built out of ten lesser unities, 
 no one of which happens to be the same as the 
 unity of the whole. And each of these chapter 
 unities is built up out of still smaller paragraph 
 unities, and each paragraph unity out of still 
 smaller sentence unities. One is reminded of 
 Dean Swift: 
 
 So naturalists observe a flea 
 Has smaller fleas that on him prey. 
 And these have smaller still to bite 'em, 
 And so proceed ad infinitum. 
 
 But the most practical thing I can say about 
 purpose in public speaking is this: I have never 
 known a student speaker to fail because he did 
 not have enough different purposes combined in 
 his speech, whereas many fail every day because 
 they have too many purposes in one speech, or 
 because they have no clear purpose at all. The 
 moral is plain.
 
 Chapter IV 
 MOTIVATION 
 
 1 APPROACH the subject of Motivation with 
 misgivings, for the reason that I have never 
 been able to make a student understand it. The 
 word seems to paralyze all ordinary intellects — 
 perhaps because it suggests the psychological 
 laboratory; words like inhibition, behavioristic, 
 and complex (the noun) appear to have a similar 
 effect. But motivation is the only word that 
 seems to cover the idea I wish to convey. 
 
 The idea itself is simple, and not at all technical 
 or mysterious. 
 
 Besides a subject and a purpose every good 
 speech must have a motive. That is, there must 
 be a reason, or a justification, for its existence — 
 or rather a whole set of reasons. There must be a 
 reason for the choice of time, of place, of speaker, 
 of subject, of purpose; a reason why the speaker 
 should find it necessary to speak; a reason why 
 the audience should be wilhng to stay and listen. 
 
 22
 
 MOTIVATION 23 
 
 Sometimes the circumstances provide certain 
 of these reasons automatically; quite often, in 
 fact. Because of this the student seldom realizes 
 how essential they are, and he never feels any 
 burden upon himself to supply them when they 
 happen to be lacking. 
 
 For example: A student recites a dreary lot of 
 second-hand facts about, let us say, the difficul- 
 ties of climbing Mt. Everest. The class quietly 
 dozes. When he is finished I ask him what his 
 motivation was supposed to be. 
 
 He stares at me with a slightly injured look, 
 and then starts out with the usual formula: 
 
 " Why — er — to tell about . . ." 
 
 I interrupt him. " Yes, yes, but why should 
 you? " 
 
 That floors him. He doesn't like to confess 
 that since he had to make a speech he thought 
 one subject would do as well as another. He 
 stammers a little and then blurts out: 
 
 "Well — I thought it would be interesting." 
 
 " How do you mean? " 
 
 He stammers again, and then his face lights 
 up; he has suddenly remembered something 
 taught him in a course in composition. 
 
 " Why," he says, " It interested me, and so I
 
 24 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 thought it would interest others. The Proff in 
 English One says that what interests the writer 
 is pretty sure to interest the reader, and you said 
 yourself we ought to choose subjects we are in- 
 terested in." 
 
 " But/' I ask, " how did the subject come to 
 interest you? Did you ever try to climb Mt. 
 Everest? " 
 
 " Oh, no ! I read an article about it in the 
 National Geographic Magazine." 
 
 " Who wrote the article? " 
 
 " Some scientist; I don't remember his name." 
 
 " Did he know anything about Mt. Everest? " 
 
 " He seemed to." 
 
 " Had he been there? " 
 
 " Yes, I think so." 
 
 "Was the article illustrated? " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; quite a number of pictures." 
 
 " Photographs? " 
 
 " Yes, I think they were." 
 
 " And so you think," I continue^ " that be- 
 cause this article interested you it ought to in- 
 terest others? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well, so it ought — and does. And the rea- 
 son is that the article is perfectly motivated.
 
 MOTIVATION 25 
 
 But that does not prove that a speech by you 
 on the same subject would interest others. As a 
 matter of fact it didn't, as you saw, and the rea- 
 son is that it wasn't motivated at all." 
 
 And then I try to explain to him and to the class 
 that there is every reason in the world why a 
 scientist, having acquired experience and photo- 
 graphs of the country about Mt. Everest, should 
 publish them in the National Geographic Maga- 
 zine; and every reason why the sort of person 
 who reads that magazine should be interested in 
 the article. " But why," I ask them, " should a 
 college student who knows no more about Mt. 
 Everest than any other casual reader of the 
 Geographic presume to lecture upon that sub- 
 ject? And why should a class of bored public- 
 speaking students manifest an interest in his 
 effort? " 
 
 They shouldn't, and they don't. And no au- 
 dience ever will manifest an interest in a speech 
 that is not in some way motivated. 
 
 It is true that outside of the classroom motiva- 
 tion is frequently automatic: that is, the speech 
 is motivated by the circumstances. If Roald 
 Amundsen is advertised to speak on the South 
 Pole everybody knows why — why there is to be
 
 26 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 a speech, why Mr. Amundsen and not some one 
 else is to deliver it, and why he has chosen that 
 subject; and nobody will pay the price of ad- 
 mission who does not really want to hear the 
 speech. That is perfect motivation, with no ef- 
 fort on the speaker's part. 
 
 Or suppose Mr. William Jennings Bryan were 
 advertised to speak on the subject of " Money." 
 Mr. Bryan's great reputation as an orator would 
 provide a part of the motivation, but only a part. 
 It would explain the choice of speaker, but it 
 would not explain the choice of topic at all. 
 People would be eager to hear Mr. Bryan speak, 
 but at the same time they would be wondering 
 what the topic really meant, and why he should 
 have chosen such a topic for such a time and place. 
 It would be his task to show them why — to pro- 
 vide that part of the motivation ; and Mr. Bryan, 
 being a skilful speaker, would do so in the first 
 few sentences. 
 
 Not all speeches, however, even outside the 
 classroom, are delivered by well-known speakers, 
 or by persons of authority. Often an audience is 
 entirely in the dark as to the identity or quali- 
 fications of a speaker, or his relation to the sub- 
 ject, or the relation of the subject to the occasion;
 
 MOTIVATION 27 
 
 especially is this true when there are to be a num- 
 ber of speakers at the one meeting. In such 
 cases the burden of motivation is likely to be en- 
 tirely on the speaker; he must provide all the 
 necessary reasons, and provide them quickly and 
 clearly. 
 
 This is just what the college student, address- 
 ing his classmates in public speaking on a sub- 
 ject of his own choosing, does not do. He should 
 understand that if he does not learn to do it in 
 class he will not realize the necessity of doing it 
 •elsewhere. He will be making ineffectiveness a 
 habit. 
 
 " But," says an objecting student, " it is very 
 hard to motivate a class speech. The occasion 
 doesn't provide any motivation, and we can't al- 
 ways find subjects we know all about; we don't 
 know enough." 
 
 I hear this sort of objection very often. Let me 
 say to the student — with brutal sincerity — 
 that the attitude of mind which the objection 
 represents is the real reason for his difficulty in 
 motivation, and for a good many other difficulties 
 that beset him in all subjects. The student of 
 today, bred to the notion that education should be 
 entertaining rather than disciplinary, seems to
 
 28 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 think that his whole duty is to perform a certain 
 painless routine along the path of least resistance; 
 that it is unfair and unreasonable for an instruc- 
 tor to ask him to do anything hard. His atti- 
 tude is passive and defensive. He will not go 
 after knowledge. He will permit the instructor 
 to give it to him, of course — provided the in- 
 structor will be entertaining in manner and 
 reasonable in his demands. If the instructor 
 wants motivated speeches the student will make 
 a reasonable effort to motivate them. If the in- 
 structor is not satisfied, well — the student is 
 sorry, but he did his best ; he cannot be expected 
 to shoulder all the worries of the course. Let the 
 instructor be clearer about it. Let him provide 
 his own subjects and motivate them himself. 
 
 I am not exaggerating. Not one bit. I have 
 had many a student, annoyed at criticism, invite 
 me to suggest subject, or purpose, or motive for 
 him, in a manner that said all too plainly, " If 
 you don't like my way of doing it, do it yourself. 
 / didn't invent motivation." Of course not, and 
 neither did the teacher. But what the student 
 seems to have missed is the fact that it is his 
 speech that is to be motivated, and his audience 
 that is to be kept awake.
 
 MOTIVATION 29 
 
 Students who have the courage to assume a 
 more sportsmanlike attitude, and who are willing 
 to learn how to motivate their speeches, will find 
 some practical suggestions in Chapter XV. But 
 they will find the suggestions of very little use 
 unless they first realize the need of motivation, 
 the meaning of motivation, and the fact that the 
 motivation of their own speeches is nobody's job 
 but theirs.
 
 Chapter V 
 ATTENTION 
 
 EFFECTIVENESS in public speaking is of 
 course largely a matter of attention — that 
 of the speaker and that of the audience — and 
 there are one or two points about the phenomenon 
 of attention which the speaker will do well to 
 bear in mind. 
 
 In the first place there is no such thing as 
 continuous attention. Attention is an instan- 
 taneous reaction resulting from an internal or 
 external stimulus, and the only way of sustaining 
 it is by renewing it with a constant series of fresh 
 stimuli. " No one can possibly attend continu- 
 ously to an object that does not change." ^ Fixa- 
 tion of attention is equivalent to destruction of 
 attention, — a principle well known to the hypno- 
 tist, who induces sleep in his subject by getting 
 him to fix his gaze on some bright object and to 
 shut everything else out of his mind. The 
 monotonous speaker does the same thing — un- 
 
 1 James, " Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, p. 421. 
 
 30
 
 ATTENTION 31 
 
 intentionally of course; he simply hypnotizes his 
 audience into a deep and peaceful sleep. 
 -__.. The problem for the speaker is how to renew 
 attention at frequent enough intervals. It would 
 be a simple matter if he could follow the method 
 used by the Pilgrim fathers in their churches. In 
 their scheme of things the preacher who could not 
 keep his congregation awake was assisted by a 
 beadle, who, when he saw a parishioner begin- 
 ning to doze off, applied the necessary stimulus 
 to renewed attention in the form of a sharp rap 
 on the head. The modern preacher, denied such 
 assistance, generally resorts to the cowardly but 
 commendable expedient of making his sermons 
 short, so that his listeners do not have time to go 
 to sleep. Some preachers — like Billy Sunday — 
 prefer, metaphorically speaking, to rap their own 
 listeners on the head by means of wild shouts, 
 gesticulations, and acrobatic " stunts " — which 
 certainly serve the purpose of renewing attention 
 however they may stand with reference to good 
 taste. 
 
 The speaker should remember that whatever 
 his method he positively must provide a variety 
 of fresh stimuli at frequent intervals if he is to 
 maintain any sort of attention. How to do so he
 
 32 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 must learn by experiment, although he will find 
 some hints in this and the following chapters. 
 The important point is that any sort of monotony 
 is utterly ruinous to attention because of the 
 simple principle just stated.^ 
 
 Another valuable fact which the speaker may 
 learn from the psychologist is that attention is of 
 two kinds: involuntary and voluntary. 
 
 Involuntary attention, which the psychologist 
 calls primary, is that which is generated spon- 
 taneously by an assault on the senses; as when a 
 gun is fired, or when a bright light suddenly flashes 
 out of the darkness, or when Billy Sunday slides 
 to second base. These are extreme examples; 
 there are milder ways of getting involuntary atten- 
 tion through the senses. But whatever attention 
 is purely animal and automatic belongs in this 
 class. 
 
 Voluntary attention, or secondary, is that 
 which results from concentration of mind, from 
 the will to attend. It is intellectual, rather than 
 animal, and is only to be relied upon in those of 
 some mentality. The sort of attention which a 
 student gives to his lessons in the wee small 
 
 1 For some further remarks on the subject of monotony 
 see Chapter XIII, pp. 107-108.
 
 ATTENTION 33 
 
 hours, with a towel around his head and a cup of 
 coffee beside him (or perhaps this isn't done any- 
 more?) is secondary attention. 
 
 The would-be public speaker might just as well 
 learn at the start that he can rely on very little 
 secondary attention on the part of even the most 
 intellectual audience, and none at all on the part 
 of an audience that is stupid, or tired, or indiffer- 
 ent. Under the most favorable conditions he can 
 expect less secondary attention from his hearers 
 than a writer can expect of a reader. The reader 
 gives his attention to a book when he feels most 
 like it ; he can choose his own time, place, position, 
 lighting, and even the reading itself; he is accus- 
 tomed to the idea of throwing himself actively into 
 the world of the book; and he is less subject to dis- 
 tractions. The listener, on the other hand, es- 
 pecially when he is one of a large audience, is 
 accustomed to being led; his attitude is passive 
 rather than active ; he yields himself to whatever 
 stimuli are affecting the rest of the mob, whether 
 those stimuli happen to be coming from the 
 speaker or from some source of distraction. He is 
 a good subject upon which to work for primary 
 attention, but a poor hand to give secondary 
 attention.
 
 34 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 The speaker must therefore school himself to 
 rely upon his own power to secure primary atten- 
 tion, and to do so with such variety and frequency 
 as to avoid loss of attention through monotony. 
 The most valuable hints that I can give him as to 
 how to do so he will find in the chapters on Con- 
 creteness, Reinforcement, and Humor; but one 
 hint has already been given in the discussion of 
 the reciprocal mental relationship between 
 speaker and audience.^ This is, simply, that a 
 very large part of the speaker's power to hold 
 attention is dependent upon his power to give 
 his own. Unless he is himself clearly giving 
 vigorous attention to his subject, to his purpose, 
 and above all to his audience, he can hardly 
 expect them to give attention to him. 
 
 A speaker is often said to experience a " clash 
 of wills" with his audience; to dominate his 
 audience by force of will power. In most cases he 
 really dominates them by force of attention. Will 
 power undoubtedly plays a part, but indirectly 
 rather than directly. The speaker's will keeps his 
 mind on the subject, keeps him in an active state 
 of voluntary attention. Through that voluntary 
 attention he develops his own best effectiveness, 
 
 1 See Chapter II.
 
 ATTENTION 35 
 
 and makes his strongest possible assault on the in- 
 voluntary attention of his audience. 
 
 It is possible, of course, for a speaker to over-do 
 this matter of will power — especially a speaker 
 of unpleasant personality. It is possible for him to 
 be so aggressive in forcing his attention upon the 
 audience, and claiming theirs, as to become offen- 
 sive; the audience feel as if he were trying to jump 
 down their throats. There are people who always 
 talk in this fashion, whether in public or in pri- 
 vate, and they are probably incurable. 
 
 In the give-and-take of attention between 
 speaker and audience, in the establishment of that 
 reciprocal mental relationship, the eyes constitute 
 the chief medium of communication. Through 
 the use of his eyes the speaker conveys to the 
 audience a sense of his own attention; through 
 his observation of their eyes he experiences a 
 sense of their response. 
 
 In giving attention he must remember to dis- 
 tribute it; to avoid giving it all to one person, or 
 to one group, or to one side of the room, with the 
 consequent effect of making the rest of his audi- 
 ence feel left out of the occasion. Neither a 
 fixed gaze nor a vacant roving gaze will do; 
 neither conveys a sense of communication to the
 
 36 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 whole audience. What the speaker must do is 
 to look into the eyes of his listeners, one at a 
 time, for a brief period only, shifting from one 
 to another with pleasing variety and with ap- 
 proximate fairness of distribution. His eyes must 
 meet theirs in focus,^ 
 
 Because of the difficulty of doing this when one 
 is self-conscious, some speakers fall into the habit 
 of looking at the wall or ceiling, while others pick 
 out friendly faces and make " hitching posts " of 
 them. The former practice generally results in 
 weakening the speaker's own sense of communica- 
 tion, and consequently his effectiveness; the latter 
 sometimes gives the speaker more confidence and 
 improves his effectiveness with the few friendly 
 listeners to whom he is directing his talk, but at 
 the expense of the general attention. The ideal 
 
 1 There are dissensions from this point of view. One of 
 the best teachers I know refuses to look at his audiences be- 
 cause he feels that it is " cheap and unworthy " to have 
 audiences " hanging upon his words." He makes a practice 
 of talking over their heads with his eyes fixed on the thought, 
 which always seems to be hanging from the ceiling somewhere 
 at the rear of the room. He has fine things to say, a vigorous 
 personality, and a powerful resonant voice; and he talks 
 most of the time to students who are too busy taking notes to 
 look up and watch him. It is my opinion that he is success- 
 ful not because of the way he uses his eyes but in spite of it. 
 However, he is certainly successful, and the student will do 
 well to examine the merits of both points of view.
 
 ATTENTION 37 
 
 situation is for the speaker to discover that every 
 face is a friendly face, and so to make a " hitching 
 post " of every listener. When he does that he 
 sometimes gets something very like a perfect state 
 of attention. 
 
 Apart from the speaker's own self-conscious- 
 ness the chief obstacle in the way of perfect atten- 
 tion is distraction, and of that something will be 
 said in Chapter VII. 
 
 253.560
 
 Chapter VI 
 CONCRETENESS 
 
 THE value of concrete illustration in any 
 form of discourse is so well known as to 
 amount to a commonplace. Any student who 
 has taken a course in public speaking or in com- 
 position knows that concrete illustration is a 
 great aid to attention and the best means of driv- 
 ing a point home. 
 
 But ask him what concreteness is; ask him to 
 explain the distinction between the abstract and 
 the concrete, — and see what happens. I have 
 asked hundreds, and have hardly ever found one 
 who could explain accurately and clearly. This, 
 of course, is normal ; we use words every day that 
 we do not know the meaning of. 
 
 If I ask ten students to explain concreteness, 
 five will say that the concrete is specific, the ab- 
 stract general. Apart from the fact that they can 
 seldom explain the difi"erence between the specific 
 and the general, this is a poor explanation, be- 
 
 38
 
 CONCRETENESS 39 
 
 cause in the first place it does not explain and in 
 the second place it is not true. The idea of good 
 qualities, for instance, is general and abstract; 
 but the specific idea of the quality of mercy is 
 equally abstract. On the other hand the general 
 idea of green, sweet-smelling meadows and rip- 
 pling brooks is quite as concrete as the specific 
 idea of one particular brook. The distinction be- 
 tween specific and general is a matter of quantity, 
 scope, or extent. That between abstract and con- 
 crete is qualitative, and psychological. 
 
 Three more of the ten will say that the con- 
 crete is that which is solid, heavy, closely packed, 
 intensely unified. They have got their concrete 
 mixed with Portland cement; they know more 
 about road-building than about mental processes. 
 Another student will perhaps confess simply that 
 he does not know the distinction; and the last 
 one will say that the concrete is the " tangible," 
 the abstract the " intangible," He is approxi- 
 mately right — if he doesn't spoil it by proving in 
 the next sentence that he does not know what 
 " tangible " means. It means " touchable," and 
 in that sense his statement is at least one-fifth 
 true. 
 
 A thing is concrete in proportion as it is in
 
 40 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 terms of the five senses^; in proportion as it 
 arouses mental images, either by physical stimu- 
 lus or by suggestion. 
 
 The human mind begins, to all intents and pur- 
 poses, as a blank. The infant receives sense im- 
 pressions, but at first they mean nothing to him 
 and provoke no response (except the negative, 
 purely instinctive response to pain). Gradually, 
 however, the child learns to recognize sensory 
 stimuli as familiar, then to associate two or more 
 of them together, then to re-create them in 
 imagination, and finally to reason about them. 
 This is the development of the thinking process, 
 sometimes called the process of abstraction. From 
 purely physical, or animal, impressions, the child 
 proceeds by increasingly difficult steps of infer- 
 ence to the realm of pure thought. 
 
 Concreteness and abstractness are relative 
 terms. A thing is concrete in proportion as it is 
 in terms of the senses; it is abstract in proportion 
 as it is in terms of the thoughts. 
 
 The senses are direct, physical, animal, and in- 
 voluntary. The thoughts are indirect, mental, 
 super- animal, and more or less voluntary; the 
 
 1 Some psychologists maintain that there are seven, or 
 nine; but the old-fashioned five will do for our purposes.
 
 CONCRETENESS 41 
 
 more abstract they become — that is, the farther 
 removed from the original sensory elements — 
 the more volition they call for. 
 
 This is the point that is vital to the public 
 speaker. The concrete, being in terms of sensory 
 images, tends to claim involuntary or primary at- 
 tention ; while the abstract, being in terms of de- 
 rived mental processes, calls for secondary or 
 voluntary attention, which, as we have seen, the 
 audience does not usually care to give. 
 
 That is all there is to it. It is very simple. 
 The speaker wants attention. To get it he must, 
 as a rule, do something that brings an involuntary 
 response; the abstract thought processes are not 
 involuntary, but voluntary; therefore he must 
 either avoid them or so support them with con- 
 crete — that is, sensory — illustrations, real or 
 imaginative, as to make the necessary assault on 
 the sensory functions of his hearers. When he 
 does so they listen. When he does not they go 
 to sleep, quite regardless of the intrinsic value 
 of what he has to say. 
 
 When you hear a speaker indulging in pro- 
 longed abstractions watch his audience and see 
 how lifeless they are. Then see what happens 
 when he says, "For instance: I once knew a
 
 42 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 man . . ." At the very sound of the words " for 
 instance " you will see the audience sit up and 
 brighten up. I have been able to illustrate this 
 point to classes repeatedly by making them do 
 that very thing. 
 
 Concreteness is the soul of attention, and it is a 
 rare speaker indeed who can make himself in- 
 teresting without it. Yet the inexperienced 
 speaker constantly fails to make use of it — partly, 
 no doubt, because he does not fully understand 
 it, and partly because it is difficult to devise ways 
 of being concrete without a certain amount of 
 hard work. When he does remember to use con- 
 creteness he almost always uses it in its crudest 
 form : that of the definite story or anecdote, used 
 as an illustration or example, and not infre- 
 quently dragged in by the heels. Not that I wish 
 to discourage the use of illustrative anecdotes — 
 far from it! But one can be concrete in other 
 ways also. The principle of concreteness can be 
 continuously and unobtrusively applied by means 
 of constant attention to imagery — by the use 
 of such words and phrases in the very statement 
 of abstract thoughts as will tend to stimulate the 
 imagination, and to make one mentally see, hear, 
 taste, touch, and smell.
 
 CONCRETENESS 43 
 
 But the speaker should remember that con- 
 creteness is personal and relative: what is con- 
 crete to one person is abstract to another whose 
 experiences have been different, A walrus is a 
 more concrete idea to an Eskimo than to a native 
 of Brazil, but a ripe mango would be a relatively 
 abstract idea to the Eskimo. Things are concrete 
 to an individual in proportion as they come 
 within his particular sensory experience of life. 
 Things he has seen are more concrete to him than 
 things he has merely seen pictures of; but the 
 latter are vastly more concrete than things he 
 has merely heard about. 
 
 The motion pictures are doing much to increase 
 the available sources of concrete illustration. 
 Niagara, for instance, was once an abstraction 
 to all but a fortunate few; now it is concrete to 
 millions who have seen it in the " movies " ; in- 
 cidents of the World War will always seem more 
 concrete to most people than those of any earlier 
 war; Japanese children now seem to most of us 
 just as real as our own, and surprisingly like them 
 in movement and facial expression. All of this 
 helps the speaker who knows how to make use 
 of it. 
 
 The most telling sort of concreteness is of
 
 44 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 course that which brings the experiences of the 
 speaker and those of his audience into closest con- 
 tact. Things that they can image together give 
 rise to the most intimate and sympathetic com- 
 mon interest, and lay the strongest possible claim 
 to the attention of both.
 
 Chapter VII 
 REINFORCEMENT 
 
 THE student of public speaking must realize 
 that the speaker's problem is different 
 from that of the writer, and in some respects 
 more difficult. Too often he imagines that it 
 is only necessary to put what he has to say in the 
 form of a clearly worded and well constructed 
 composition, and then speak it out loud. He for- 
 gets that his business is not merely to express 
 himself, but to impress his audience. 
 
 It is possible for a writer to put the best of him- 
 self into a book and then go away and forget 
 about it; and no amount of indifference on the 
 part of some readers will injure the quality of the 
 book itself, or its effectiveness with those readers 
 who are not indifferent. Some writers — like 
 George Meredith, for instance — deliberately 
 write for a select few, knowing that the general 
 public will not care for what they write; but the 
 knowledge does not embarrass them or interfere 
 
 45
 
 46 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 with their performance in the least. Some- 
 times they write even better for it. 
 
 A speaker, however, has all his hearers together 
 in one room, and is there himself. Any inatten- 
 tion, indifference, or hostility on the part of even 
 a few of the audience endangers his effectiveness 
 in two ways: It tends to become contagious and 
 spread to others; and it tends to react on the 
 speaker hunself, diminishing his self-command, 
 and consequently his command of the audience 
 as a whole. If the writer feels any disconcerting 
 reaction from his readers it is only after the book 
 is done and out of his hands ; but the speaker be- 
 gins to get his reactions before he has fairly 
 begun, and many a speech has been ruined be- 
 cause an indifferent minority demoralized the 
 speaker. 
 
 There is only one way out: The speaker must 
 shoulder the entire obligation of keeping every- 
 body interested and attentive all of the time. 
 
 Of course some students will say that this is too 
 hard; and no doubt it is — for them. Neverthe- 
 less it can be done. 
 
 The chief obstacle is distraction. 
 
 Distraction is primary attention gone wrong. 
 The listener finds his attention engaged by stimuli
 
 REINFORCEMENT 47 
 
 coming from sources other than the speaker — 
 sometimes from within himself and sometimes 
 from without. Occasionally the stimuli even 
 come from the speaker, but from the wrong part 
 of him — his hands or feet, for instance, instead 
 of his brain. 
 
 A listener is more subject to distraction than 
 a reader. In his relaxed mood he gives very- 
 little secondary attention, but he is fair game 
 for every stimulus to primary attention regard- 
 less of its source. Every time somebody coughs, 
 or the door opens, or shuts, or the fire engines go 
 past outside, he is distracted. If he notices a 
 mannerism or peculiarity of the speaker, he is dis- 
 tracted. If what the speaker says reminds him 
 of something else, he is distracted. If the room 
 is too hot or too cold, or the lighting is unpleas- 
 ant, or the lady sitting next to him has a vicious 
 hat-pin, or a fly settles on the bald head in front 
 of him, he is distracted. And every time he is 
 distracted his distraction tends to communicate 
 itself to those near by, and the contagion spreads. 
 
 The reader, on the other hand, being in a 
 more concentrated mood, is more nearly proof 
 against this distraction. There are, as a rule, 
 fewer sources of distraction about him, because
 
 48 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 there are fewer people; and even when there is 
 plenty of distraction he has better means of fight- 
 ing it. He can, to some extent, choose his own 
 time and place to suit his mood, instead of having 
 to fit his mood to the occasion. He can usually 
 adjust the temperature and lights to suit him, 
 and pick out the most comfortable chair; and if 
 there is no comfortable place handy he can post- 
 pone his reading or go somewhere else. He can 
 set his own pace, reading rapidly or slowly as he 
 prefers ; he can read much or little at a time ; and 
 when he is distracted, or when he is puzzled by 
 the text, he can re-read as often as he pleases until 
 he has mastered the passage or caught up the 
 broken thread of the discourse. 
 
 Compare this with the plight of the listener, 
 and you see why the speaker's task is not easy. 
 In a large audience the room will be too hot for 
 some and too cold for others; the lights will be 
 bad for some; some will be too near the doors, 
 others too far from the speaker; some will be in 
 one mood and others in another; some near- 
 sighted, others far-sighted; some in good health, 
 others in bad; some fresh, others tired. If the 
 speaker talks rapidly he will confuse some of his 
 hearers; if he talks slowly he will bore others; and
 
 REINFORCEMENT 49 
 
 except on the most informal occasions the listener 
 who has failed to understand a point, or has been 
 interrupted or distracted, will allow his attention 
 to lapse permanently rather than ask the speaker 
 to repeat a passage. 
 
 Obviously the speaker cannot forestall all of 
 these sources of inattention. Momentary dis- 
 tractions are bound to occur. He cannot prevent 
 them; therefore he must fight them. 
 
 Whole-hearted attention on his part will help; 
 so also will directness and sense of communica- 
 tion; and so will the concreteness which makes 
 so strongly for primary attention. But most 
 important in this connection is the simple device 
 of reinforcement of ideas. 
 
 Audiences, though passive, are generally well 
 disposed and rather anxious to listen. Given a 
 fair chance they will recover from their distrac- 
 tions and renew their attention. But frequently 
 the speaker does not give them a fair chance ; he 
 says everything just once, and leaves it to the 
 listener to catch it if he can. 
 
 What student has not had the experience of 
 coming into a classroom late and being unable to 
 discover what the teacher was talking about until 
 the end of the hour? A lecturer in the history of
 
 50 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 English literature, for instance, will mention the 
 name of a writer just once and then talk about 
 him for from twenty to fifty-five minutes. In 
 this case the late-comer is not the only one in 
 difiiculty; unfaiTiiliar proper names are always 
 hard to catch, and perhaps half the students pres- 
 ent will miss that writer's name. For a few 
 moments they will listen eagerly in the hope of 
 catching it on repetition, but if the repetition 
 does not come, who can blame them for losing in- 
 terest? Every time a listener is distracted for a 
 moment and misses something he goes through a 
 similar experience. 
 
 A really effective speaker reckons with this 
 condition. He realizes that there is a constant 
 leakage in his speech: some of his ideas are es- 
 caping some of his listeners all of the time. To 
 counteract it he resorts to a piling up of effect, 
 to a constant reinforcement of ideas, by more 
 repetition and more illustration than a writer 
 ever has need for. His motto is, " Hit them again 
 in the same place." 
 
 Ideas may be reinforced in many different 
 ways. Crude repetition is the most obvious; but 
 it is by no means to be despised, especially in 
 the case of proper names, pregnant phrases, or
 
 REINFORCEMENT 51 
 
 statements of fundamental import. Reiteration, 
 or repetition in different words, is an excellent 
 method of reinforcement and often a great aid 
 to clearness. Concrete illustration, one of the 
 most valuable methods, has already been dis- 
 cussed. Parallelism of construction is a method 
 particularly useful in reinforcing relationships of 
 ideas. The use of figures of speech is helpful. 
 Testimony — quotation of the opinions and ob- 
 servations of others — is a well known method, 
 sometimes relatively overworked by students. 
 And if nothing else will serve, plain " harping " 
 is better than no reinforcement at all, although 
 it is quite possible to harp on one idea too long, 
 destroying much of the good accomplished. 
 Sometimes a speaker will convince an audience 
 and then spoil it all by over-reinforcement, until 
 the boredom engendered obscures the conviction 
 or wipes it out altogether. But there is more 
 danger of boredom in the kind of harping that 
 comes from vagueness, or lack of ideas, or from 
 accidental repetition, than in that which comes 
 from intentional reinforcement of ideas. 
 
 The method of reinforcement is a matter to 
 be governed by circumstances; the principle is 
 universal and essential. Because of distractions
 
 52 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 and because of the mental inertia of audiences, 
 things must be pounded home. A well-known 
 educator says that he never expects anything to 
 sink in until he has said it at least six times. 
 His motto also, you see, is, " Hit them again in 
 the same place."
 
 Chapter VIII 
 PERSUASION 
 
 THE speaker desires above almost every- 
 thing else to be able to influence his au- 
 dience, in accordance with his purpose, whatever 
 it happens to be. 
 
 There are, roughly, two methods of influencing 
 people, the emotional and the intellectual. Many 
 psychologists insist that there is no real dis- 
 tinction; that reason and emotion are insepa- 
 rably connected and that each is merely a re- 
 action of the whole mind. This may be true, 
 but there is certainly a distinction in method of 
 approach, and this distinction is useful to the 
 student. 
 
 It is customary to speak of the emotional 
 method as persuasion, the intellectual as argu- 
 mentation or conviction.^ Persuasion may be 
 defined as the attempt to influence others by 
 emotional means; that is, by appealing to their 
 instincts, feelings, or sentiments, rather than 
 
 1 Most writers prefer the word conviction, and use the 
 term argumentation to cover both conviction and persuasion. 
 To me, conviction means a result rather than a method or 
 process. 
 
 53
 
 54 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 their reasoning powers. It is by no means to 
 be thought of as limited to obvious emotional 
 outbursts — to heroics, and " crocodile tears " ; 
 more often it is nothing but sincere feeling 
 quietly interwoven with the thought of the dis- 
 course. It may even be interwoven with argu- 
 mentation itself, in the sense that a sound 
 argument may be put persuasively rather than 
 repulsively. 
 
 Effective persuasion rests, of course, upon the 
 speaker's understanding and use of the instincts, 
 sentiments, and feelings that actually exist in 
 mankind. These are many and complicated, and 
 their relative power varies widely with circum- 
 stances. They will repay much study. But 
 study alone will not help the speaker, unless at 
 the same time he cultivate sympathy. Many 
 speakers understand human nature and human 
 motives, yet fail to persuade because they are 
 cold and impersonal, or even contemptuous of 
 the motives they pretend to appeal to. 
 
 Underlying all human motives are the basic 
 instincts of self-preservation and perpetuation 
 of species. Crude and obvious instincts in the 
 lower animals, they manifest themselves in man 
 with all sorts of disguises and refinements, but 
 they are there just the same.
 
 PERSUASION 55 
 
 Self-preservation is the strongest motive there 
 is, and it is less carefully disguised than perpet- 
 uation of species. " One must live," says the 
 modern man as an apology for all sorts of selfish 
 behavior. But he does not make the apology 
 until he is cornered; he prefers, if possible, to 
 deceive himself and others by pretending that 
 it is the safety of his family or country that he 
 is concerned about, rather than his own safety. 
 Sometimes, of course, this is true; his instinct 
 of self-preservation has given way to a higher 
 impulse, growing out of his education or train- 
 ing. It is more apt to be true of cultivated 
 people than of brutish people; it is one of the 
 definitions of a gentleman. It is also more apt 
 to be true of everybody in times of emotional 
 stress — war-time, for instance — than in times 
 of placid " normalcy." In war-time even the 
 lower orders of human beings will set self-pres- 
 ervation aside for the sentiment of patriotism or 
 of moral indignation. Generally, however, there 
 is much more of the instinct of self-preservation 
 in human motives than appears on the surface. 
 
 So likewise with the instinct to perpetuation 
 of species, except that this is almost always con- 
 cealed, since education has taught us to think
 
 56 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 of the instinct itself as base. But we think very 
 highly of some of the motives derived from this 
 instinct, including maternal and paternal affec- 
 tion, love of home, the desire of each sex to 
 appear to advantage in the eyes of the other, the 
 chivalrous impulses of men toward women, and 
 many others. The instinct has simply been re- 
 fined out of its original semblance by centuries 
 of education ; it has not been destroyed. 
 
 These two basic instincts, in conjunction with 
 educational influences drawn from history, tradi- 
 tion, religion, philosophy, literature, and law, 
 have served to plant in mankind a great variety 
 of impulses, so deeply rooted as to constitute 
 automatic and powerful motives. 
 
 Next to the orginal instincts themselves, one 
 of the strongest of these motives is the impulse 
 to acquire property. It is often spoken of as an 
 instinct in itself, but it is undoubtedly composite. 
 Self-preservation is at the root of it, for human 
 institutions have so developed that one must 
 acquire some property in order to live. Love of 
 adornment plays a part — originating perhaps in 
 the sex instinct. The manifold pleasures that 
 money will buy, the love of giving to others, 
 the love of power, all contribute, each being com-
 
 PERSUASION 57 
 
 posite in itself; and in addition there is undoubt- 
 edly a love of possession for possession's sake, 
 which is found in savages but increases with ma- 
 terial civilization. But the great masses of man- 
 kind, barely able to meet the cost of living, are 
 driven by the law of self-preservation to a greater 
 interest in property than they might otherwise 
 show; and the speaker can make effective use of 
 this when addressing an audience of hard-work- 
 ing, every-day people. 
 
 Next in strength, if not in prevalence, is prob- 
 ably the will to power. This is not felt so much 
 by those who have never had their appetites 
 whetted by the taste of power ; but among a cer- 
 tain class of successful men-of-the-world it is al- 
 most the dominating motive. Men of great 
 wealth and influence will quite generally tell you 
 that they do not care about making more money 
 for its own sake, or for what it will buy, but that 
 they stay in the game of big business, or politics, 
 because they enjoy the sense of control — control 
 over other men, over systems or institutions, over 
 forces greater than themselves. The impulse is 
 not necessarily selfish ; it is a form of aspiration, 
 and has done much to stimulate real progress. It 
 is varied but universal. In one man it will be the
 
 58 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 thrill of driving an automobile or sailing a yacht; 
 in another the genius of organization ; in another 
 t/he brutish instinct of the bully. But it is con- 
 scious and cumulative in proportion to experi- 
 ence, and the speaker will find he can appeal to it 
 most powerfully in an audience of fairly success- 
 ful people. 
 
 Another strong motive is personal pride. One 
 likes to be thought well of by others. This may 
 be partly ulterior; a business man, for instance, 
 may wish to preserve a reputation for square 
 dealing as a means of encouraging trade. 
 " Honesty is the best policy " is a popular, if im- 
 moral, doctrine. But deep down in every indi- 
 vidual who has felt the influence of civilized 
 thought is a real desire to be held in good repute 
 — even in those who have no particular ambition 
 for fame or power. The cynical and worldly-wise 
 often scoff at it and disavow it; but they are 
 scoffing at " sour grapes," or whistling to keep 
 their courage up. A saloon-keeper who was some- 
 what looked down upon by his neighbors not only 
 because of his occupation but because of certain 
 sharp practices for which he was noted, used to 
 boast that he did not care what people thought of 
 him so long as he made money and kept within
 
 PERSUASION 59 
 
 the law; but when he died it was found that he 
 had willed a hundred thousand dollars for the 
 erection of a handsome monument over his grave. 
 That gave him away; he had jeered at honor in 
 life, and then made a pitiful attempt to buy it 
 when he was dead. 
 
 Almost as universal as the motives so far men- 
 tioned, and the most powerful of all in some in- 
 dividuals, is the motive of affection, or personal 
 attachment. Since it is largely an individual 
 matter it cannot always be made use of by the 
 speaker addressing an audience; yet there are 
 times when the appeal to men on behalf of the 
 women they love, or to parents on behalf of their 
 children, will be the best possible means of per- 
 suasion. 
 
 It would not be possible, in this brief chapter, 
 to discuss all the manifold impulses and motives 
 of men. Devotion to God, love of country, sense 
 of duty, loyalty to tradition, civic pride, sense of 
 beauty, sense of gratitude, sportsmanship, esprit 
 de corps, good taste, honesty, moral indignation 
 — these are just some of them. The speaker's 
 task is not merely to study them and theorize 
 about them, but to make use of them; to appeal 
 to them in his audience; to make his thoughts
 
 60 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 and opinions acceptable by bringing thean into 
 harmony with the impulses most strongly at work 
 in the audience. 
 
 To that end he must never cease his study of 
 human beings and their behavior. He must train 
 himself to sense the impulses in his audience, and 
 to turn them to account gently, sympathetically, 
 and unobtrusively,— and let us add, honestly. He 
 must remember that the finest sort of persuasion 
 is the negative sort that we call tact ; which con- 
 sists not in an ostentatious appeal to favorable 
 impulses, but in considerate avoidance of unfavor- 
 able ones; in putting unattractive, even un- 
 pleasant, truths inoffensively. And finally he 
 must cultivate the virtue of tolerance; he must 
 learn to appreciate the other fellow's point of 
 view. Only by so doing can he hope to make the 
 other fellow appreciate his. 
 
 None of these things can be learned in a niin- 
 ute, and none of them can be applied coldly, at 
 will, and laid aside when not wanted. The speaker 
 who attempts it is inviting disaster; he is deceiv- 
 ing himself and trying to deceive others. He 
 must play fair, and to do so he must make these 
 things habitual ; he must live them, on and off the 
 platform.
 
 Chapter IX 
 ARGUMENTATION 
 
 ARGUMENTATION, or conviction, is the 
 attempt to influence others by intellec- 
 tual processes; to convince by reasoning. 
 
 Speeches which are devoid of everything except 
 argumentation are perhaps not very common; 
 but every speech which has for its purpose to 
 convince is basically argumentative, although the 
 rational processes may be completely fused with 
 the persuasive ones. With any audience but a 
 coldly intellectual one the fusing is necessary 
 and desirable; argumentation and persuasion 
 work best hand in hand. But they can best be 
 studied separately, the processes involved being 
 by no means simple even then. 
 
 It would be impossible to cover the principles 
 of argumentation in a single chapter, or even in 
 a whole book the size of this one. A four-hundred- 
 page text-book is hardly large enough to cover 
 them thoroughly, and a one-semester course in 
 
 61
 
 62 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 argumentation is always too short. The student 
 who would learn to speak effectively is advised to 
 make an adequate study of argumentation at the 
 earliest possible moment; if he cannot take a 
 course in the subject he can at least read one of 
 the many excellent text-books.^ 
 
 My purpose here is merely to suggest the basic 
 nature of the reasoning process, point out one or 
 two of the commonest pitfalls, and make a few 
 recommendations for special study. 
 
 Most teachers of argumentation advocate a 
 course in logic to precede or accompany the 
 study of argumentation. This is an excellent 
 plan, and I heartily recommend it; but I recom- 
 mend even more heartily a study or review of the 
 subject of plane geometry. In plane geometry 
 we see the rational process, not in theory but in 
 practice; and we see it in its simplest and sound- 
 est form, applied to the materials of an exact 
 science. 
 
 Consider this process as seen in geometry. We 
 begin with axioms (self-evident truths) and 
 postulates (statements so clearly derived from 
 the axioms as to be universally acceptable), and 
 proceed through a succession of clearly demon- 
 
 1 See Appendix B.
 
 ARGUMENTATION 65 
 
 strated theorems in the order of increasing must 
 culty. For the proof of each theorem we m bp 
 have: 
 
 1. Materials of proof, or facts in evidence, includ- 
 ing (a) axioms, (b) postulates, (c) previously proved 
 theorems, — but nothing else. 
 
 2. A clear demonstration (usually illustrated) of 
 the reasoning process by which the mind infers the 
 truth of the proposition from the truth of the facts 
 in evidence. 
 
 3. A conclusion, consisting of a statement of the 
 proposition proved. 
 
 In geometry, dealing as it does with exact 
 materials, we see this process clearly in every 
 theorem, no matter how difficult. In argumenta- 
 tion, dealing with human affairs in all their com- 
 plexities and imperfections, we do not see it so 
 clearly, but it is there just the same. There can 
 be no true argumentation without it. In every 
 piece of sound argumentation we have : 
 
 1. The materials of proof, generally spoken of as 
 the evidence. 
 
 2. The process of proof, or demonstration, gen- 
 erally spoken of as the argument. 
 
 3. The proposition to be proved, which when 
 proved becomes the conclusion.
 
 62 HAN^DBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 argume study of argumentation falls naturally into 
 whaee parts: 
 
 1. Analysis: the study of propositions, and of the 
 issues involved in them. 
 
 2. The study of evidence. 
 
 3. The study of argument. 
 
 In geometry there is very little need of analy- 
 sis in the sense here intended ; the proposition is 
 by pre-arrangement simple and definite; the is- 
 sues are fairly clear in the proposition as defined. 
 
 But in argumentation the proposition is apt 
 to be complex, and is almost sure to be obscured 
 by masses of contentious discussion most of which 
 has really nothing to do with the case. Before 
 one argues he must find out exactly what he is 
 arguing about, and to do so he must analyze. He 
 must examine the history of the question, includ- 
 ing the immediate cause of discussion ; he must de- 
 termine what the proposition really is; he must 
 see where the burden of proof lies; he must con- 
 sider what others have said for and against the 
 proposition; he must sift this material out, 
 eliminating what is irrelevant, what is admitted 
 by both sides, and what he is willing to grant; and 
 he must find the issues — that is, those points
 
 ARGUMENTATION 65 
 
 in the proposition which the affirmative must 
 prove in order to establish a case. Finally, he 
 must determine upon which of those issues to 
 stake his own case. 
 
 This, in one paragraph, is the problem of analy- 
 sis, a problem demanding months of careful study. 
 The importance of it will be seen in the fact 
 that some cases practically prove themselves 
 when once clearly analyzed. I think I can say 
 without fear of contradiction that failure to ana- 
 lyze correctly occasions more disasters to student 
 speeches than failure to argue plausibly. 
 
 The second study, that of evidence, is no less 
 extensive, but in a way it can be summed up in 
 a single principle: No statement may be offered 
 as evidence of the truth of something else unless 
 it is itself acceptable as true; acceptable to the 
 person to be convinced, not merely to the 
 speaker. 
 
 In geometry one may use as evidence only 
 axioms, postulates, and previously proved propo- 
 sitions. 
 
 In argumentation one may use only axiomatic 
 assertions, or assertions which, like postulates, 
 are acceptable as true, or statements previously 
 proved or which the speaker is prepared to prove
 
 66 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 and does prove immediately. To use as evidence 
 a statement that does not satisfy this rule is to 
 build the structure of the argument on sand; 
 sound reasoning from unsound premises is utterly 
 valueless. 
 
 Given evidentiary statements which are accept- 
 able as true, there still remains the question of 
 their relative weight. Some kinds of evidence are 
 more convincing than others. On this subject 
 much may be learned from the practice of the 
 courts, in which certain classes of evidence — 
 such as " hearsay evidence " — are barred as un- 
 trustworthy; and in which certain other classes 
 
 — such as undesigned testimony, and testi- 
 mony given against the interests of the witness 
 
 — are considered especially weighty. The stu- 
 dent will find the chapter on evidence in almost 
 any text-book on argumentation a piece of very 
 fascinating reading. 
 
 The third study is the study of the reasoning 
 process itself; the study of argument. It is here 
 that logic plays a part — or ought to. Unfortu- 
 nately many students of logic seem to think 
 of it as a pleasant game of charts on paper; some- 
 thing to amuse like a Chinese puzzle, or to de- 
 velop the intellect, like chess. It never occurs to
 
 ARGUMENTATION 67 
 
 them that the syllogism is anything real; it would 
 surprise them to be told that they use syllogisms 
 every day. 
 
 The syllogism, technicalities aside, is simply 
 the basic form of deductive reasoning. All 
 reasoning is either inductive or deductive; that 
 is, it is either a generalization from particular 
 premises, or a particular application of a general 
 premise. The syllogism consists of the general 
 premise, plus a particular premise defining the 
 particular application, plus a conclusion stating 
 the particular truth derived: All men are 
 mortal; I am a man; therefore I am 
 
 mortal. 
 
 The chief danger of error in inductive reason- 
 ing is the danger of too hasty or too careless a 
 generalization; in ordinary English we call it 
 " jumping to conclusions," and everybody does it, 
 more or less. 
 
 The chief danger in deductive reasoning is the 
 danger of committing one of the many well-known 
 fallacies to which the syllogism so easily lends 
 itself. No one who wishes to influence others 
 through speaking can afford to be ignorant of 
 these fallacies. " Begging the question," " illicit 
 major," "undistributed middle," " argumentum
 
 68 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 ad hominem " — these are not fanciful terms in- 
 vented by the teacher to play with in the class- 
 room; these are real errors in thought which one 
 hears all about him in the trolley-cars and on the 
 street-corners, and some of which every student 
 of public speaking commits almost every time 
 he opens his mouth. The mistake most students 
 make is in supposing that errors in reasoning are 
 easy to see and easy to avoid, and that all one 
 needs is a little common sense. On the contrary, 
 they are often plausible, tricky, and deceiving, 
 and more than a match for " common " sense, 
 which is, of course, a very poor sort of sense. 
 What is needed is uncommon sense — good sense 
 in the superlative degree — backed by a thorough 
 knowledge of the wiles of fallacious reasoning. 
 
 One reason why the student should not neglect 
 the study of argumentation is that it has some of 
 the qualities of a boomerang. If you do not hit 
 the other fellow with it it will come back and 
 hit you. Once you have essayed to influence 
 others by reasoning with them you must carry 
 it through successfully, or the reaction will more 
 than wipe out your advantage. It will leave 
 your audience more thoroughly convinced than 
 ever that they are right and you are wrong. Con-
 
 ARGUMENTATION 69 
 
 viction that does not convince is even worse than 
 persuasion that does not persuade. 
 
 The student must bear in mind, also, that 
 argumentation is not confined to formal debates, 
 or even to speeches which as a whole have con- 
 viction as their purpose. In the ordinary give- 
 and-take of all kind of speeches there is con- 
 tinual argumentation, even though much of it is 
 concealed. The speaker is being constantly re- 
 quired to answer the unspoken question and re- 
 fute the unspoken objection as it occurs; to argue 
 his way as he goes. To do so successfully he has 
 just as much need of sound reasoning processes 
 as he could possibly have in formal debate.
 
 Chapter X 
 DRIFT 
 
 IN THIS chapter and the next we have to con- 
 sider two very practical problems of per- 
 sonality and method as well as of principle. These 
 have to do with the qualities of drift and humor 
 in public speaking. 
 
 No comment is more often heard in criticism 
 of a speaker than the simple question, " What 
 is he driving at? " 
 
 Failure of the speaker to make his drift clear 
 may arise from any one, or any combination, of 
 a number of causes: 
 
 1. It may arise from an actual lack of unity in 
 the subject matter. The speaker may really be talk- 
 ing about several different things without any very 
 clear idea as to which is the main thing. 
 
 2. It may arise from vagueness of purpose on the 
 part of the speaker. He may have a unified subject, 
 but no clear concept of what he is trying to do to his 
 audience. This is one of the commonest causes. 
 When I have occasion to ask^ "• student speaker what 
 he is driving at it is very seldom indeed that he 
 
 70
 
 DRIFT 71 
 
 answers me with a statement of purpose.^ When pur- 
 pose is uppermost in a speaker's mind he generally 
 manages to make his drift clear. 
 
 3. It may arise from the failure of the speaker 
 to define his subject at the beginning, when the ob- 
 scurity or complexity of the subject makes such defi- 
 nition necessary. 
 
 4. It may arise from incoherence. The speaker 
 may have a single purpose and single subject, but 
 may so bungle the construction and arrangement of 
 his speech that one finds it impossible to follow him. 
 
 5. It may arise from poor emphasis; that is, he 
 may have his leading thoughts buried in inconspic- 
 uous places, or he may present them without sufficient 
 heightening of manner, and so encourage his audience 
 to miss everything of importance and to puzzle over 
 the trifles. 
 
 6. It may arise from too much abstraction, and too 
 little concreteness.^ 
 
 7. It may arise from a lack of climax; that is, the 
 speaker may have failed to arrange his thoughts in 
 the order of increasing importance up to the point at 
 which he is ready to begin his conclusion. 
 
 8. It may arise from monotony. Wlien a speaker 
 lacks variety in pitch, force, or tempo, or in manner, 
 it is easy for the listener to fall into the hypnotic state 
 previously described,^ and in that state he naturally 
 loses the drift of the discourse. 
 
 9. It may arise from over-glibness on the part of 
 the speaker; words flow from him so freely that the 
 
 1 F Chapter III. 
 
 2 See Chapter VI. 
 
 3 See Chapter V.
 
 72 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 audience is nearly drowned in the torrent, and loses 
 all sense of direction. 
 
 10. It may arise from the speaker's own vague- 
 ness or uncertainty of mind, whether real or apparent; 
 the speaker will seem to be feeling his way, hesi- 
 tatingly, and with no firm grip on himself. The au- 
 dience soon catches his spirit, wonders what he is 
 driving at, and wonders if he knows. 
 
 11. It may arise from insufficient reinforcement of 
 ideas, so that points essential to an understanding of 
 the speaker's drift are constantly escaping the 
 audience.^ 
 
 12. Besides all of these fairly obvious causes, and 
 many others, it may arise, and often does arise, from 
 a much more subtile cause. The speaker himself 
 may not feel sufficiently the need of making his drift 
 clear. He may know his subject and his purpose well 
 enough; his speech may have a coherence and an em- 
 phasis that would be perfectly apparent in a steno- 
 graphic report; he may be making plentiful use of 
 concrete illustrations, with variety and interest at 
 all points; he may — on paper — have perfect struc- 
 ture and climax, each idea having a function in con- 
 tributing to the main thought, with the threads drawn 
 together perfectly at the end; and still people may 
 be yawning all through his speech and saying, 
 " Well . . . what is he driving at? " 
 
 The fact is that there are ways and means of con- 
 veying ideas — or not conveying them — too subtile 
 for analysis. What is on the speaker's mind some- 
 how gets to the audience, though his words may not 
 
 1 See Chapter VII.
 
 DRIFT 73 
 
 exactly convey it. If he allows his mind to wander 
 from its main course, to stop and play with ideas by 
 the way, to over-elaborate minor points, or to dwell 
 upon himself, even though nothing he does is very 
 wrong, his audience will sense the state of his mind, 
 and will lose consciousness of his drift, just as he 
 does. But if he keeps constantly aware of his own 
 objective, and alive to the necessity of having his 
 audience follow him, he is very likely to make them 
 feel the drift as they should. 
 
 Students are often troubled by this idea of 
 drift, confusing it with such things as unity, or 
 climax. One will say, when I ask him what he 
 is driving at : " Well, if I tell you now there will 
 be nothing left to say at the end. I might as well 
 stop speaking." It seems to him that he should 
 keep something back in order to preserve the sus- 
 pense. So he should. But the audience does not 
 ask to have everything told at once; it does not 
 want the conclusion at the beginning. That is 
 not what I mean by drift. The audience merely 
 wants to be kept aware that there is a conclusion, 
 and that things are drawing towards it, and that 
 everything is contributing to it and bringing it 
 nearer. There is no anti-climax in that. 
 
 Another student, having finished his speech 
 and having been accused of lack of drift, will
 
 74 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 point out that everything in the speech really did 
 contribute to the conclusion, and that he brought 
 it all together in the end. But that is unity, not 
 drift. Drift is not a matter of retrospect; it is 
 something the listener wants to feel every minute 
 of the time. Though hard to define, it is easy to 
 feel — when it is there. When it is not, every- 
 body squirms and murmurs, " What is he driving 
 at?"
 
 Chapter XI 
 HUMOR 
 
 IT WOULD be impossible for the public 
 speaker to take his task too seriously, but it 
 is quite possible for him to take it too soberly; 
 and he generally does. 
 
 A student may be known at home as the village 
 cut-up, and keep everybody in gales of laughter 
 whenever he is out in company; but when he 
 rises to speak before his classmates in college he 
 behaves more like the village undertaker. 
 
 There seems to be a popular delusion to the 
 effect that one must suppress the temptation to 
 be humorous in order to appear dignified. It 
 rests, of course, on a misconception of humor; 
 people think of humor as something frivolous, 
 even a little cheap, and are rather ashamed to 
 give way to it. Those who make a habit of in- 
 dulging in the cheapest types of humor in private 
 are most apt to feel that way about it; they are 
 unable to conceive of such a thing as dignified 
 humor, being so used to the undignified kind. 
 
 75
 
 76 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 The really humorous speaker who keeps his audi- 
 ences chuckling, yet at the same time earnestly 
 appreciative, is generally found to be a quiet 
 soul in private life, incapable of ribald jest. 
 
 True humor is hard to define. Most people 
 agree that it is something deeper than mere wit, 
 or mere horseplay; that it is closely allied to 
 pathos; that it is universal and human; that it 
 is rather a matter of attitude than of things. One 
 may drag in a joke, and perhaps raise a laugh, yet 
 fail utterly of being humorous ; on the other hand 
 one may talk sincerely of serious things with just 
 a little whimsical, individual twist, and have his 
 audience laughing and crying at the same time. 
 
 The most popular definition of humor is that 
 which links it with a sense of incongruity. A 
 sense of incongruity, in turn, must rest upon a 
 sense of values, a sane, well-balanced apprecia- 
 tion of the fitness of things — the truest and 
 rarest sort of wisdom. 
 
 If this seems too broad a statement, think how 
 many wise thoughts have been expressed with a 
 touch of humor, and how many humorists have 
 been rated as prophets in their wisdom. Dickens, 
 Lincoln, and Mark Twain — to take three very 
 different types — were all consistent humorists;
 
 HUMOR 77 
 
 and all three were philosophers, preachers, and 
 practical reformers. Dickens wrote of the follies 
 and the crimes of his day with a humor that 
 ranged from the most genial to the most bitter, 
 and he struck those follies and crimes a telling 
 blow. Lincoln told diabolically funny stories to 
 illustrate his most determined opinions; he was 
 the greatest master of parable since Christ, and 
 his parables were nearly always amusing. And 
 Mark Twain, kindly creator of Tom Sawyer and 
 Huck Finn, has been called the most relentless 
 and dangerous enemy of popular sham in recent 
 generations. 
 
 Nobody expects the college student of public 
 speaking to display the mature, well-balanced 
 humor of a Dickens or a Mark Twain. But there 
 is no reason why he shouldn't at least be his 
 natural self. 
 
 Watch a group of students conversing in club 
 or fraternity rooms, or in the library, or on the 
 athletic field, or in the classroom before the lec- 
 ture, and you will see plenty of smiles and hear 
 occasional bursts of laughter — even though you 
 know them to be discussing matters that they 
 take quite seriously. But watch any one of the 
 same group doing his turn in the public speak-
 
 78 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 ing class, or taking part in a debate, and 
 see the difference! I have seen men who joked 
 with Death in 1918 frown and scowl painfully 
 over something no more serious than the tariff, 
 or the evils of co-education. They have a sense 
 of humor, unquestionably, — a sense of humor 
 that would not yield to the horrors of war; 
 but it yields most ingloriously to a little self- 
 consciousness. 
 
 Occasionally, to be sure, a daring student does 
 come along and upset tradition by introducing a 
 little humor into his speeches — not so much be- 
 cause of an inner urge as because he has been told 
 that it is a good thing and is willing to try any- 
 thing once. Generally he pursues the wrong 
 course: he introduces the humor in order to be 
 humorous, not in order to be clear, or natural, 
 or illuminating. The result is that his humorous 
 effort appears to be dragged in by the heels. The 
 jokes may be funny, but they are irrelevant; they 
 exist as jokes, for their own sake, but they inter- 
 rupt the flow of thought, and hinder more than 
 they help. Moreover, the jokes themselves, in- 
 troduced in this way for mere effect, are apt to 
 seem strained, because the speaker, sensing their 
 artificiality, becomes self-conscious about them
 
 HUMOR 79 
 
 and tells them badly, struggling hard to be funny 
 and generally overdoing it to the point of being 
 painful. 
 — The kind of humor that is really worth while 
 is the kind that grows naturally out of the 
 thought — is a part of the thought, not a piece 
 of foreign matter. As I have already said, it is 
 not matter at all, but manner; it is the speaker's 
 attitude towards the matter; his angle of vision; 
 his appreciation of the incongruities he observes. 
 He may introduce a humorous anecdote to illus- 
 trate a point, but unless he has first felt the 
 potential humor in the point his illustration is 
 in great danger of seeming far-fetched. The most 
 genuine and most effective humor in public 
 speaking is that which manifests itself not so 
 much in humorous stories and examples as in 
 spontaneous twists of phraseology and flashes of 
 imagination, and in a lively sense of connotation. 
 The true humorist does not always have to drag 
 in humorous anecdotes to illustrate his points: 
 he is able to see that his points (or some of them) 
 are humorous — that there are elements of in- 
 congruity in them that can be brought out. When 
 he does use illustrations he is often able to do 
 so by means of quick similes and metaphors in-
 
 80 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 stead of roundabout stories; he uses the word 
 " hke " for a connective instead of a long palaver 
 to the effect that " This reminds me of a story I 
 once heard about a man who . . ." and so on. 
 He does not hesitate to cite real particular in- 
 stances in order to illustrate a general truth, but 
 he is very sparing indeed of far-fetched analogies 
 and elaborate parallels intended to be merely 
 funny. 
 
 Is it possible to learn to be humorous? Yes 
 and no. It is not possible for a person born ob- 
 tuse, with no sense of values or relationships in 
 life; nor is it possible for one who is congenitally 
 ill-natured and intolerant. But for a normal 
 human being, which means a human being with 
 some sense of humor in him, it is quite possible. 
 It is a question of bringing out what is there. 
 Often self-consciousness is the c^hief obstacle; 
 sometimes there is failure to observe and under- 
 stand other people. Experience, study, and 
 analysis will do much to remove both of these 
 difficulties. 
 
 There are certain well-known elements of 
 humorous appeal which are universal enough to 
 justify serious study. Among them may be 
 mentioned:
 
 HUMOR 81 
 
 1. The trivial, but spectacular, mishap. People of 
 any nation or degree of civilization will laugii when 
 a fat man slips on the ice. But their reactions after- 
 wards will vary; and nothing will offend people of 
 good taste more quickly than an over-indulgence in 
 this sort of humor. Their disapproval is not merely 
 objective: it is temperamental; they are ashamed of 
 themselves for being caught laughing at such horse- 
 play. But the fact that they do laugh indicates the 
 universality of the appeal ; and it is perfectly possible 
 to utilize this element with sufficient restraint and 
 originality to avoid offense. 
 
 2. The downfall of false dignity, as when a snob 
 in a tall silk hat runs afoul of a snowball fight. 
 These two elements are often associated, and some of 
 the funniest scenes on the stage and screen as well as 
 some of the funniest stories are dependent upon them. 
 Both are subject to the same limitations, and pro- 
 voke the same reaction of disgust when carried to the 
 point of vulgarity or when repeated too often. The 
 throwing of custard pies is no longer amusing to 
 persons of ordinary maturity and decency, although 
 it may still be used to entertain the children and the 
 feeble-minded. 
 
 3. Exaggeration, or hyperbole. Not all exaggera- 
 tion is humorous: often it is merely prevarications. 
 But there is a way of exaggerating things with the 
 tongue in the cheek which puts no false values on 
 them, but rather serves to emphasize their real value 
 by contrast. There is a fictional element in such 
 exaggeration which is a strong stimulant to the 
 imagination. Much of the humor of Mark Twain 
 is based upon exaggeration; he will so over-state a
 
 82 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 truth as to make it outrageously absurd, yet some- 
 how the truth is not lost. One laughs at his grotesque 
 statement that he has seen at least a barrel of nails 
 "from the true Cross" in the churches of Europe; 
 but one does not miss the vital fact that somewhere 
 somebody is shamming. 
 
 4. Paradox. The paradox has been defined by 
 G. K. Chesterton, one of its greatest masters, as " the 
 truth stood on its head to attract attention." It is 
 a statement of thought by seemingly irreconcilable 
 opposites, usually followed by explanation. Not all 
 paradoxes are humorous, but the humorous paradox 
 is one of the most effective. 
 
 5. Irony, or sarcasm, which is closely allied to the 
 paradox in that it involves opposite statements ; irony, 
 however, implies an element of criticism which is 
 not necessarily found in the paradox, and the oppo- 
 sition of statement is real rather than merely ap- 
 parent. Paradox is a matter of form and irony a 
 matter of intention. It is really paradoxical to say 
 that "prohibition does not prohibit"; it is perhaps 
 ironical to say that it does. 
 
 6. Parody; the presentation of absurd matter in 
 serious form, particularly in imitation of the form 
 of a serious thing already familiar, for purposes of 
 burlesque. Almost every well-known poem has been 
 parodied many times. Poe's "Annabel Lee " for ex- 
 ample has been imitated with marvelous fidelity to 
 rhyme and meter in a set of nonsense verses entitled 
 " The Cannibal Flea." 
 
 7. Travesty; the opposite of parody, consisting of 
 serious matter presented in comic or degraded form. 
 Parody and travesty are seldom carefully distin-
 
 HUMOR 83 
 
 guished, and the terms are generally used loosely and 
 interchangeably. 
 
 8. Satire; the comic treatment of a folly or abuse 
 for purposes of ridicule; it may employ the methods 
 of parody or travesty, but with an ironical and criti- 
 cal intention, an element of attack, not found in pure 
 parody. It may be gentle or it may be severe, but 
 the moment it becomes ill-natured and intolerant it 
 ceases to be humorous. Generally, also, it ceases to 
 be very useful to the public speaker. 
 
 9. Grotesquely; the distortion of natural objects in 
 fanciful or bizarre ways for humorous effect. Like 
 satire it ceases to be humorous when it becomes ill- 
 natured, and the only reaction it provokes is disgust. 
 It is seen at its worst in the cartoons of Germany, 
 Sweden, and Spain; compare them with those of 
 Punch or Life, or with the good-humored comics of 
 Fontaine Fox, and you cannot miss the difference. 
 Good-natured grotesquery has a universal appeal, 
 witness the popularity of the Sunday newspaper 
 comics, which often have nothing else to recommend 
 them. 
 
 10. Irreverence. American humor, particularly, is 
 irreverent in spirit, not necessarily to the point of 
 being blasphemous or offensive, but sufficiently to 
 produce slight shocks and thrills; it is especially 
 irreverent of custom, tradition, and secular authority. 
 America began with rebellion against authority, and 
 has been more or less steadily engaged in it ever 
 since ; and the American people take a more exquisite 
 delight in outraging authority than any other people 
 — bar the Irish, to whom authority means England. 
 And when a humorist can couple daring irreverence
 
 84 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 with a genuine attack on sham, as Mark Twain did, 
 he is likely to be popular in America, at least. 
 
 11. Tolerance. True humor is tolerant, although 
 a spirit of tolerance is not inconsistent with vigorous 
 attack. One may disapprove tolerantly; he may be 
 merciless in his ridicule of human behavior, yet toler- 
 ant of the human being whose behavior he attacks. 
 Scathing wit does not appeal; it may make an audi- 
 ence laugh, but it hardens them. It does not win 
 sympathy for the speaker or his views; it may even 
 win sympathy for his victim. The humor that laughs 
 with, rather than at somebody is the kind that really 
 counts. 
 
 12. Individuality. The very word humor once 
 meant " individual bent, or trait of character." It 
 is the little differences between individuals and in- 
 dividual points of view that make the incongruities 
 of life and thought. He who would be truly humorous 
 must be humorous in his own way. Not by imitating 
 others, but by developing himself, will he learn the 
 secret of genuine humor. 
 
 Such are the commonest elements of humorous 
 appeal. The list is not complete, and, I confess, 
 not very homogeneous, but it may be useful in 
 a purely suggestive way. 
 
 A little study of these elements will show the 
 speaker that there is a common denominator, — 
 namely, incongruity. As I have already said, a 
 real sense of incongruity rests upon a sense of
 
 HUMOR 85 
 
 values. The speaker's task, therefore, is not 
 merely to provide himself with a stock of jokes 
 to draw upon. It is rather to educate himself to 
 a keen sense of the fitness of things and a lively 
 appreciation of the incongruities out of which 
 jokes are made. By this means he will learn to 
 see the potential humor in his own thought proc- 
 esses, and to enliven them in a way that is really 
 his own. 
 
 The speaker who has accomplished this has 
 better equipped himself not only to deliver 
 prepared speeches, but also to meet success- 
 fully the conditions of extemporaneous speaking; 
 for a ready flow of genuine humor is the surest 
 and best means of meeting many of the emergen- 
 cies that are constantly arising — interruptions, 
 accidents, heckling, and so on — and almost the 
 only means of meeting determined hostility. One 
 of the most famous speeches of all time — the 
 Liverpool Speech of Henry Ward Beecher^ — 
 illustrates admirably the extent to which this 
 is true. In his attempt to deliver that speech 
 Beecher faced an audience that had come pur- 
 posely to drive him from the platform. With un- 
 conquerable good nature and unfailing sense of 
 
 1 See " The World's Great Orations," Vol. X.
 
 86 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 humor he fenced and parried with his audience 
 for an hour, meeting every emergency as it arose 
 and compelling them to laugh with him, until at 
 last he won himself a hearing. 
 
 A speaker who can do that will never be dis- 
 concerted when the lights unexpectedly go out, or 
 a drunken man grows troublesome, or the audi- 
 ence develops an unexpected reaction. But he 
 cannot laugh down the tribulations of the speaker 
 unless he is accustomed to laughing down the 
 tribulations of the man.
 
 Chapter XII 
 VOCABULARY 
 
 IT IS often said that the " tools " of speech 
 are words, tones, and actions; and the stu- 
 dent may be wondering why I have postponed 
 discussing these things so long. The reason is 
 that while extremely important they are not fun- 
 damental. Good tools are always an asset; but 
 they do not make a speaker any more than they 
 make a carpenter or a dentist. One may have a 
 beautiful voice, graceful gestures, and a superb 
 command of the language, and yet be a hollow, 
 artificial, insincere, and ineffective speaker; on 
 the other hand one may be a surprisingly effec- 
 tive speaker in spite of a poor voice or awkward 
 gestures. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was 
 a tremendously powerful speaker, though his ges- 
 tures were monotonous and his voice shrill. He 
 had something to say and a sincere, vigorous way 
 of saying it, and such a man will be listened to 
 whether his tools of speech are in perfect con- 
 dition or not. 
 
 87
 
 88 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 But this is no argument in favor of poor tools. 
 He who would do his own best must strive persist- 
 ently to perfect his voice, gestures, and com- 
 mand of language, to the end that they may be- 
 come, not his masters, but his good and faithful 
 servants. In this and the next two chapters are 
 set down a few facts concerning these tools which 
 may at least help to start the student on the right 
 sort of self- training. 
 
 The command of language that a speaker needs 
 is so largely a matter of his general education 
 and of his training in composition and literature 
 that it need not be fully covered here. But there 
 are certain special problems of language which 
 confront the speaker as distinguished from ihe 
 writer, and these are properly our province. 
 Some of them have already been discussed in con- 
 nection with Concreteness, Reinforcement, and 
 Drift; others will be considered later in connec- 
 tion with Methods of Preparation. One problem, 
 however, merits separate consideration — the 
 problem of vocabulary. 
 
 Vocabulary, in the larger sense, includes phrase- 
 ology as well as diction; it is the sum total of 
 language material. 
 
 When a student talks fluently but incorrectly,
 
 VOCABULARY 89 
 
 using ungrammatical constructions and barbar- 
 isms of speech, it is evident that the fault lies with 
 his general education. His only remedy is more 
 schooling, more reading, more association with 
 educated people. He needs vocabulary building 
 by all means, but from the inside out — ideas as 
 well as words. His difficulty is not specifically a 
 matter of public speaking. If he is sensible 
 enough to realize his deficiency at all he is not 
 generally puzzled as to its nature. 
 
 But often a student comes to me whose diffi- 
 culty is quite different from this. His general 
 education and environment have been good, he 
 perhaps writes very well, and he seldom offends 
 by vulgarities of speech; yet he is troubled on 
 the platform by a failure of words. He stumbles, 
 hesitates, and in desperation uses words and 
 phrases that are painfully clumsy and inadequate. 
 He knows they are inadequate, and his listeners 
 know that he knows; yet he seems perfectly help- 
 less. His vocabulary seems to be unequal to the 
 expression of his thoughts. 
 
 He comes up to me afterwards, disgusted with 
 himself. " I can't understand it," he says ; " I 
 know what I want to say, but when I get up there 
 the words won't come. I could sit down and
 
 90 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 write it easily enough, and never be troubled for 
 words, but on the platform I get all fussed and 
 rattled, and can't think of the right words to save 
 me. What's the matter with me, anyway? " 
 
 Sometimes the matter is partly nervousness or 
 self-consciousness occasioned by some miscon- 
 ception of the speaker's task^ and always this may 
 be a contributing cause. But the matter is chiefly 
 a faulty speaking vocabulary. 
 
 The student may think himself fairly well 
 equipped with words because he can write. What 
 he fails to understand is that the writing vocabu- 
 lary is one thing and the speaking vocabulary 
 another. 
 
 There are really four vocabularies — a reading 
 vocabulary, a writing vocabulary, a hearing 
 vocabulary, and a speaking vocabulary — almost 
 as distinct as four different languages. One may 
 know four different languages, but know some of 
 them better than others ; and one may be able to 
 translate better from, say, French into English, 
 than from English into French. 
 
 Of the four vocabularies — reading, writing, 
 hearing, speaking — the first two are bound 
 up with the visual sense, the last two with the^ 
 auditory. The reading and hearing vocabularies
 
 VOCABULARY 91 
 
 are receptive, or sensory; the writing and speak- 
 ing are active, or motor. The reading and hear- 
 ing involve actual sensations and the memory; 
 the writing and speaking involve kinesthetic sen- 
 sations and the imagination. 
 
 The four do not develop simultaneously, and 
 are not constant in their relative proportions. 
 The hearing vocabulary develops first; the child 
 learns to understand words before it learns to 
 speak them. The speaking vocabulary is a close 
 second, and develops in intimate relationship 
 with the hearing vocabulary through the years 
 of liveliest curiosity and keenest imitative sense 
 — the years when a child repeats aloud each new 
 word that it hears. But it never quite catches up 
 to the hearing vocabulary. 
 
 The reading and writing vocabularies simply 
 do not exist at first, even after the other two are 
 well developed. They begin with schooling. At 
 first they develop together, and indeed are almost 
 identical; but from the time when the child first 
 begins to read for himself the reading vocabulary 
 begins to outstrip the writing, and the gap gradu- 
 ally widens. At the same time these two vo- 
 cabularies rapidly begin to overtake the hearing 
 and speaking vocabularies, and by the time the
 
 92 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 child is half-way through the grammar school 
 they have far outstripped them. In persons of 
 considerable education the reading vocabulary 
 may be two or three times as large as the hearing 
 vocabulary, and the writing may be ten times 
 as large as the speaking. 
 
 It is the last fact that may account for our 
 friend's predicament. He may have a large 
 writing vocabulary (as well as a large reading 
 one), but his speaking vocabulary may be small. 
 In ordinary conversation he does not notice it be- 
 cause one uses a very small vocabulary anyhow in 
 conversation; but when he attempts to speak on 
 more formal occasions, making larger demands 
 upon his supply of words, the words simply won't 
 come. He knows them, in the sense that he could 
 use them easily enough in writing, but they do 
 not come to his tongue and lips because he is not 
 accustomed to speaking them out loud; he has 
 no kinesthetic realization of those words, that is, 
 he does not know how it feels to utter them. 
 
 The extent to which this discrepancy prevails 
 is well illustrated when students of composition 
 are asked to read their own themes aloud. Time 
 and again they come upon words that they have 
 used themselves, and used correctly, but which
 
 VOCABULARY 93 
 
 they are utterly unable to pronounce. A cynic 
 might blame this difficulty on the popular habit 
 of stealing themes instead of writing them; but 
 he would be less than half right. I have re- 
 peatedly found students unable to pronounce 
 words that they used freely and habitually in 
 their daily writings; and I have seen them very 
 much astonished to discover their inability. It 
 had never occurred to them to be curious about 
 the sounds of the words; their association was 
 entirely with the visual sense, not the auditory. 
 The two are in different worlds. 
 
 Given a deficiency in any one of the four vo- 
 cabularies, there are three ways of going about 
 removing it : 
 
 1. By increasing all the vocabularies. 
 
 2. By widening the channels of association between 
 them. 
 
 3. By adding directly to the deficient one. 
 
 The four vocabularies might be compared to 
 four tanks containing unequal quantities of heavy 
 oil, and having very narrow connecting passages, 
 allowing only a slight leakage from the higher 
 levels to the lower. If no oil were added, the 
 four bodies would eventually find a common 
 level; but if oil were added often and in proper-
 
 94 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 tionate quantities the leakage would not be suffi- 
 cient to overcome the inequalities, and some tanks 
 would retain a higher level than others. 
 
 Obviously, a low level in any one tank could be 
 raised by increasing the quantity of oil in the 
 others, and consequently the pressure at which 
 the leakage took place; or by widening the con- 
 necting passages; or by pouring oil directly into 
 the tank concerned. 
 
 In the normally educated person of college age 
 or thereabouts the level is highest in the reading 
 vocabulary, and lowest in the speaking. But the 
 passage between these two is the narrowest, be- 
 cause the association is the least direct; one is 
 sensory and visual, the other motor and auditory. 
 The widest passages are- those between the two 
 visual vocabularies and between the two auditory. 
 
 Keeping this analogy in mind the student 
 should endeavor to analyze his own difficulties, 
 and to remedy them in accordance with the sug- 
 gestions given. Any exercise that will put words 
 directly into the deficient vocabulary, or that will 
 increase the association between that vocabulary 
 and the others, or that will substantially increase 
 the pressure in the others, will be beneficial. 
 
 For the improvement of a deficient speaking
 
 VOCABULARY 95 
 
 vocabulary the best exercise I know is thoughtful, 
 wide-awake reading aloud, because: 
 
 1. It fills up the reading vocabulary faster even 
 than silent reading, for one must read all the words 
 instead of just "skimming"; and this increases the 
 pressure in the largest tank. 
 
 2. It increases the association between the reading 
 and speaking vocabularies, thus widening the most 
 important channel of leakage. 
 
 3. It puts words directly into the speaking vocabu- 
 lary, since the reader actually speaks each new word 
 on first acquaintance, instead of merely hearing it 
 or looking at it. By reading from many different 
 authors with different vocabularies he can make this 
 process very rapid. 
 
 The second best exercise, not always so readily 
 available, but never to be neglected when the 
 opportunity affords itself, is conversation with 
 well-educated people, because: 
 
 1. It re-stimulates the imitative process of child- 
 hood; one hears others using good words and strives 
 to do likewise. 
 
 2. It fills up the hearing vocabulary, from which 
 words leak most easily into the speaking vocabulary. 
 
 The third best exercise is the habit of reading 
 aloud whatever one writes, because: 
 
 1. It increases the association between the writing 
 and speaking vocabularies, utilizing the two motor 
 impulses in common.
 
 96 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 2. It increases the association between the read- 
 ing and speaking vocabularies, in some measure at 
 least. 
 
 3. It strengthens the connection between the 
 writer's own thought processes and the kinesthetics of 
 speech. 
 
 Better than any one of these exercises is the 
 judicious use of all three, under which a poor 
 speaking vocabulary can hardly fail to improve. 
 But in the performance of any or all of them it 
 must be borne in mind that no good is accom- 
 plished by gazing at an unfamiliar word, wonder- 
 ing what it means and how to pronounce it, and 
 then passing it up. The student will never get 
 anywhere unless he is willing to look in the dic- 
 tionary now and then and learn something for 
 himself. A student who hasn't ambition enough 
 to provide himself with a good dictionary and use 
 it is a " weak sister," and the sooner somebody 
 tells him so the better.
 
 Chapter XIII 
 VOICE 
 
 LUCKY is the speaker who possesses a good 
 voice, whether he got it by accident of 
 birth, or by virtue of careful training in child- 
 hood. Not that the good voice will in any sense 
 make him a good speaker — I cannot repeat too 
 often that it will do nothing of the sort — but 
 that it will save him a great deal of bother and 
 worry that would otherwise steal time from more 
 important things. 
 
 For the singer, of course, voice is paramount. 
 He must begin early and build constructively for 
 many years, not merely to escape faults, but to 
 realize positive beauties of voice for the interpre- 
 tation of music. A good speaking voice, however, 
 is not necessarily beautiful in this sense. It 
 should be sufficiently so, of course, to fall 
 pleasantly rather than unpleasantly on the ear. 
 It should be free of such abuses as nasality, harsh- 
 ness, and extremes of pitch, because these things 
 distract and annoy the audience, but it need not 
 
 97
 
 98 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 be surpassingly melodious. It should be flexible 
 and responsive enough to convey the feelings of 
 the speaker, but it need not be capable of operatic 
 pyrotechnics. The chief requirements are that 
 it shall be loud enough and clear enough to reach 
 a large audience easily, that it shall be free of 
 aU distracting qualities whether good or bad in 
 themselves, that it shall be accompanied by dis- 
 tinct articulation, and that it shall be so naturally 
 produced as to withstand fatigue. 
 
 Nature has given each normal human being 
 the makings of a reasonably good voice, and prac- 
 tically every failure to realize such a voice is 
 traceable to abuse of some kind. If human beings 
 lived natural animal lives there would be little 
 'need for voice training, and none for voice cor- 
 rection, except as the result of physical accident. 
 But we do not lead natural lives. We live indoors 
 instead of out, breathing dust, gas, and carbon 
 dioxide instead of pure air; we wear foolish 
 clothes and abuse our stomachs, subjecting our- 
 selves to catarrh, laryngitis, and bronchitis; we 
 spoil our natural habits of breathing by squeezing 
 ourselves with belts, vests or corsets, and by sit- 
 ting long hours in cramped and unnatural posi- 
 tions; and we impose upon ourselves — and our
 
 VOICE 99 
 
 children — all sorts of artificial restraints and 
 constraints in the use of the voice under the guise 
 of social propriety. 
 
 The wonder is not that some voices are poor 
 in quality or tire easily; the wonder is that 
 people of college age or older have any voices 
 left. That they have is simply due to the marvel- 
 ous persistence of Nature in claiming and re- 
 claiming her own. Give her half a chance and she 
 will set things right even after appalling abuse. 
 
 For the public speaking student of college age 
 voice training is not a matter of creating some- 
 thing artificial that did not exist before. It is a 
 matter of correcting such abuses as have arisen 
 and restoring the natural voice; and with a few 
 fortunate individuals it is not even that. 
 
 Problems of voice include those of breathing, 
 vocalization, and articulation. The latter, being 
 acquired 'through civilization, is perhaps not a 
 matter of voice in the physiological sense, but it 
 is most conveniently studied in connection with 
 voice. 
 
 Of breathing and vocalization it can be posi- 
 tively said that the correct method is the natural 
 method. But what is the natural method? The 
 only way to find out is to observe the behavior of
 
 100 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 the only truly natural people in the world: the 
 children. 
 
 When a child feels the impulse to shout, his 
 mouth and throat open wide, he sucks in a full 
 breath, and he shouts. He puts his whole body 
 into the effort, and for that reason he seems to feel 
 no effort. There is no special strain in any one 
 place. His breathing may be diaphragmatic, or 
 ajbdominal — most teachers of voice insist that 
 correct breathing is abdominal — but he is no 
 more conscious of his abdomen or his diaphragm 
 (of which he has never heard) than he is of his 
 femurs when he runs. What is more important, 
 he is entirely unconscious of his throat; no matter 
 how loud he shouts and screams it never seems 
 to feel uncomfortable to him, simply because his 
 throat is quite relaxed and free from strain. 
 
 We marvel at the child's power to keep up the 
 screaming and shouting all day with no apparent 
 effect except physical fatigue. When we grown- 
 ups shout a little we generally grow quite hoarse; 
 and even without shouting, many of us who have 
 to talk every day manage to maintain chronic 
 cases of " clergymen's sore throat." We can be 
 reasonably sure that most of the children will 
 eventually acquire the same difficulties.
 
 VOICE ' 101 
 
 When does the change begin? It begins when 
 we first say to the child in defense, not of his 
 voice, but of our own civilized nerves: " Sh ! Don't 
 scream so! You will ruin your voice. You must 
 learn to talk quietly and politely." The child 
 instantly becomes conscious of his voice — for 
 the first time. Instead of producing it naturally 
 he now assumes a strained, artificial tone, restrict- 
 ing his breath, and constricting his throat. 
 Through years of such treatment he goes on to 
 develop a voice that is perhaps soft and polite 
 in conversation, but that is produced at the cost 
 of unnatural breathing and throat constriction. 
 Then when he wants to use his voice more freely 
 and vigorously, as in addressing a large audience, 
 he cannot do so; he has forgotten how, and only 
 succeeds in straining himself and going hoarse. 
 
 When a person has got into such a state there 
 is only one way to get out. He must take himself 
 in hand and correct the faulty habit. Most 
 people are terribly afraid of habit; they would 
 rather remain slaves to it than endure the hard- 
 ship of fighting it, for in the early stages a fight 
 with habit undoubtedly requires determination 
 and hard work. But with intelligence and perse- 
 verence it is really much easier to change a habit
 
 102 HANDBOOK ^F PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 than most people suppose, and the farther you 
 go the easier it gets. 
 
 The first step, naturally, is to find out what is 
 wrong. It is surprising how many people seem 
 perfectly willing to omit that step, and to go 
 floundering around wasting time and effort to 
 no purpose. Success in fighting habit rests upon 
 clear and careful analysis of the situation, fol- 
 lowed by concentration of effort. A physician 
 usually makes some sort of an attempt to find 
 out What is wrong with a patient before he pre- 
 scribes a remedy; he doesn't start with the as- 
 sumption that the patient has every disease there 
 is and prescribe the whole pharmacopoeia. But I 
 have often known a teacher of " expression " to 
 prescribe a whole chapter of vocal exercises to an 
 entire class, and hold daily drills with military 
 uniformity and precision. Fortunately, vocal 
 exercises are not as dangerous as drugs, and the 
 teacher, unlike the physician, is able to " get 
 away with " this sort of treatment. Instead of 
 killing his patients he merely makes them feel 
 foolish, doing them very little injury, and per- 
 haps even a little good. But he does not ac- 
 complish very much in the direction of correcting 
 specific faulty habits in individual students; and
 
 VOICE 103 
 
 the student will not accomplish very much for 
 himself, with or without a teacher, unless his 
 efforts are based upon a pretty accurate diagnosis 
 of his particular needs. 
 
 The most serious vocal faults that I have found 
 among students of college age or thereabouts are 
 the following: 
 
 1. Faults in breathing 
 
 a. Insufficient lung capacity, due usually to 
 neglect of the habit of deep breathing. 
 
 b. Breathlessness, due to the habit of speaking 
 with the lungs nearly empty, and no breath 
 reserve. 
 
 c. Inadequate control of breath, due usually to 
 some form of constriction that has resulted 
 in a cramped habit of breathing. 
 
 d. Fluttering, or temporary loss of control, due 
 to nervousness. 
 
 2. Faults in vocalization (tone production) 
 
 a. Breathiness; wasteful use of more breath 
 than is necessary to produce a good tone, re- 
 sulting in a thin, weak tone and in shortness 
 of breath. 
 
 b. Guttural placing; a habit of producing the 
 tone too far back in the throat; usually asso- 
 ciated with failure to open the mouth wide 
 enough. 
 
 c. Nasality; due sometimes to a habit of pass- 
 ing the air through the nose while speaking, 
 and sometimes to complete or partial obstruc-
 
 104 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 tion of the nasal and post-nasal cavities, in- 
 terfering with head resonance. The latter is 
 often a matter of growth or malformation, 
 needing medical attention rather than vocal 
 exercises. 
 
 d. Harshness; discord, due to the presence of 
 disharmonic rather than harmonic overtones. 
 Since the voice has a strong tendency to 
 reflect the feelings this fault is most often 
 found in irritable, or ill-natured, or ill-bred 
 people. However, it is sometimes the re- 
 sult of disease, or merely of habit. 
 
 e. Faulty pitch; too low, or (more often) too 
 high. Sometimes variable and uncertain. 
 Often associated with harshness, and may be 
 due to similar causes, or to an unmusical ear. 
 
 f . Flatness, or woodenness ; due to a lack of suffi- 
 cient resonance. Not so serious as some other 
 faults, but limits the expressiveness of the 
 voice, and makes it harder to hold sympathy 
 and attention. 
 
 g. Monotony, when a matter of vocal habit, 
 especially monotony of pitch. But monotony 
 is more often a mental than a vocal fault.^ 
 
 h. Hoarseness; a symptom of chronic vocal 
 abuse; sometimes an obstinate habit, espe- 
 cially with those of German or Yiddish 
 origin. 
 
 i. Tonelessness ; a habit of speaking in con- 
 sonants only, neglecting the vowels; of speak- 
 ing in noises rather than tones. 
 
 1 See Chapter V; also page 108, this chapter.
 
 VOICE 105 
 
 Faults in articulation 
 
 a. Slovenly enunciation; plain, all-round care- 
 lessness in forming the sounds of speech. 
 Very common. 
 
 b. "Mushy" enunciation; talking as if the 
 mouth were full of mush. Due to physical 
 causes such as too much or too little saliva; 
 or to fatigue or brain fag; or to lack of flexi- 
 bility in lips and tongue and jaws, with failure 
 to open the mouth wide enough. 
 
 c. Slurring; failure to form clearly such sounds 
 as seem a little hard, especially combinations 
 of consonants like st, sp, pr, pt, kt, etc.; also 
 final ng as in all present participles. 
 
 d. Habitual failure to finish sounds, especially 
 final consonants like t, p, or k. Perhaps 
 merely a form of slurring, but a specific 
 national habit with Americans. 
 
 e. Habitual contraction of words and elision of 
 syllables, as in " comp'ny " or " tell 'em." 
 
 f. Habitual insertion of extra vowels, as in 
 " athaletics." When this and other faults of 
 pronunciation are due to ignorance rather 
 than habit they are matters of vocabulary 
 rather than of voice. 
 
 g. Tongue-tie, lisping, or other speech impedi- 
 ments due to minor malformation. In all 
 but extreme cases, however, they are boimd 
 up with habit, and will yield to exercises. 
 
 h. Stammering, stuttering, or other serious 
 speech defects. These are usually due to 
 mental, though often subconscious, causes, 
 and are bound up with the emotional biog-
 
 106 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 raphies of the victims. They seldom yield to 
 simple exercises, but require expert treatment 
 by trained speech-correctionists. 
 
 i. Habitual difficulty in enunciating certain 
 sounds, due to foreign birth or environment. 
 Common, and obstinate. 
 
 j. Mispronunciation of many kinds due to 
 environment and habit. 
 
 k. Drawling; prolonging the vowels and mouth- 
 ing the syllables. Very common with 
 Southerners. 
 
 This is a very rough list, far from complete, 
 and possibly not very scientific; but it does 
 include all of the vocal faults that have come to 
 my attention in class and that are serious enough 
 to interfere with the effectiveness of the speaker. 
 I set them down here by way of warning, and by 
 way of help to the reader who must shift for him- 
 self. But the diagnosis of faults in the individual 
 and the prescription of corrective exercises is 
 properly the business of the teacher; or in the 
 case of speech defects, the psychiatrist or the 
 surgeon. A list of good corrective exercises will 
 be found in Appendix A of this book, and from it 
 the teacher may prescribe, or the student select, 
 suitable treatment for the correction of any com- 
 mon fault that is a matter of habit. For the
 
 VOICE 107 
 
 treatment of the more obstinate faults, particu- 
 larly actual speech defects, the student will need 
 expert help, and the teacher who is not himself 
 a trained speech-correctionist should refer the 
 student to some one who is. 
 
 With or without the assistance of a teacher, 
 the student who would correct his vocal faults 
 should remember one or two safe and sane 
 principles: 
 
 1. Good voice production is natural, easy, painless. 
 The presence of strain or pain is a sure sign of incor- 
 rect method. 
 
 2. In good voice production there may be violent 
 muscular action in the region of the diaphragm, but 
 the throat is open and relaxed, and the speaker is 
 unconscious of its existence. 
 
 3. Nobody can breathe badly twenty-three hours a 
 day and then breathe correctly at will for purposes 
 of pubhc speaking. Good breathing must be habitual. 
 
 4. All problems of forming or correcting habit turn 
 upon the fact that habit is cumulative; that every 
 time you win you strengthen the good habit, and 
 every time you lose you strengthen the bad one. 
 
 5. A little regular practice at frequent intervals 
 is better than sporadic orgies of practice. 
 
 Besides the common faults in voice production 
 so far mentioned, there are some errors to be 
 guarded against in the use of the voice. Some
 
 108 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 speakers with perfectly adequate voices do not 
 speak loud enough, simply as a matter of habit, 
 or of poor judgment. Others speak too loud. A 
 few speakers play with their voices; they seem 
 to enjoy the sound of their own inflections, and 
 indulge in all sorts of vocal gymnastics whether 
 called for by the thought or not. But by far the 
 commonest fault in the use of the voice is 
 monotony. 
 
 Monotony is simple lack of variety. It is pos- 
 sible to vary the voice in pitch, in force, or in 
 tempo, and it is possible to be monotonous in any 
 one of these elements, or in all three. Monotony 
 of pitch is the most distressing form of monotony, 
 but it is also the easiest to recognize and guard 
 against; it is usually a matter of habit. Monotony 
 of force is destructive to meaning and to climax, 
 and generally arises from a lack of emphasis in 
 the speaker's mind. Monotony of tempo, or 
 pace, is the most insidious form of monotony, and 
 the hardest to deal with; it is one of the last 
 faults to yield to training, and as a rule it yields 
 only to training. A really skilful use of variety 
 in tempo is one of the marks of the finished 
 speaker. 
 
 Most of the vocal faults which are pronounced
 
 VOICE 109 
 
 enough to interfere with a speaker's effectiveness 
 are also obvious enough to be easily recognized. 
 There is nothing mysterious about them. They 
 call for sane criticism and diagnosis, followed 
 by regular hard work for a long period of time. 
 You cannot reform twenty-year-old habits in 
 twenty minutes — or twenty days. But with a 
 correct diagnosis and reasonably persistent effort 
 almost any bad habit can be overcome.
 
 Chapter XIV 
 ACTION 
 
 THE eye is quicker than the ear, and hence 
 a better road to primary attention. It is 
 easier to keep awake at the "movies" than in 
 church, quite regardless of the depth of one's re- 
 ligion. One has to use very little mental effort 
 to watch a photoplay, even though there are few 
 explanatory sub-titles; the visual sense is so 
 much livelier than the auditory that one can re- 
 lax, mentally and physically, and yet miss very 
 little of what is going on. 
 
 People are actually more sensitive to what a 
 speaker does than to what he says ; and no doubt 
 the tremendous vogue of the motion picture is 
 intensifying this condition by training the public 
 to read actions rather than words. But the 
 strongest appeal, of course, lies in a harmonious 
 combination of actions and words; which is why 
 the spoken drama still remains a far more vital 
 thing to those who patronize it than the motion 
 picture can ever hope to be. The problem for the 
 
 110
 
 ACTION 111 
 
 public speaker is to " suit the action to the word, 
 the word to the action " ; to be neither a phono- 
 graph nor a windmill, but a natural, life-like 
 human being. 
 
 Of late years there has been something of a 
 prejudice against gesture in public speaking, oc- 
 casioned no doubt by the absurdities and arti- 
 ficialities of gesture as taught in some of our 
 elocution schools a few years ago, and employed 
 more or less generally in church sociable " reci- 
 tations " and high school declamations. People 
 still remember with horror the base drum and 
 semaphore arm movements with which a youth- 
 ful " Spartacus " exhorted imaginary gladiators, 
 to the delight of proud parents and the discom- 
 fort of embarrassed audiences. Better no gesture 
 at all, they say, than gesture like that! 
 
 The trouble was that those gestures were un- 
 natural; but it is not true, as some people seem 
 to think, that all gesture is unnatural. 
 
 The small child uses plenty of gesture. He 
 does more: he uses action in the broadest sense. 
 He talks with his whole body — with his hands, 
 arms, feet, head, face, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, 
 shoulders, and voice; and while certain high- 
 strung persons may object that he is unrestrained, 
 nobody ever accuses him of being unnatural.
 
 112 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 The unnaturalness is acquired later. The child, 
 having been taught to restrain his exuberance, 
 becomes quiet, stiff, and unexpressive. He for- 
 gets how to make natural gestures, and does not 
 make any; or he makes silly little abortive ones 
 from the wrist or elbow, checking them before 
 they can develop. 
 
 His case is not hopeless, for as I said in the 
 last chapter Nature will do wonders in the effort 
 to win back her own if you give her half a chance. 
 
 But the elocution-school method of gesture 
 training did not give Nature half a chance. 
 Natural gestures depend upon a highly complex 
 but entirely subconscious coordination of mind 
 and body; upon the "whole mechanism," as the 
 psychologists call it, working without thought or 
 effort, as in the case of the small child. The elo- 
 cutionist sought to substitute for this subcon- 
 scious coordination a conscious coordination 
 learned by formal drill and applied from the out- 
 side. He classified and named the gestures, prac- 
 ticed them carefully, selected the proper ones for 
 each declamation, and memorized them with the 
 declamation — or more commonly afterwards. Of 
 course this method never produced naturalness 
 or sincerity. How could it?
 
 ACTION 113 
 
 " Ah ! " says the elocutionist, " but it would if 
 it were learned thoroughly, for Art conceals Art ! " 
 
 Nothing can conceal that sort of art, not even 
 the genius of a great artist. The saying was in- 
 tended for the Fine Arts, and it means simply 
 that good artistry is less obtrusive than clumsy 
 artifice. But the Fine Arts are frankly arts, not 
 realities ; they do not ask or need concealment. 
 
 In a normal, natural, genuine function of life 
 like public speaking, where everything is real, and 
 where complete sincerity is the great virtue, you 
 cannot plaster Art on from the outside and expect 
 it to conceal the fact that it is Art. You cannot 
 give an artistic imitation of public speaking and 
 fool people — actually deceive them — into think- 
 ing it is real ; not unless you are a born liar. The 
 only technique than can possibly be helpful and 
 at the same time sincere and genuine, is that 
 which is developed from the inside out. 
 
 The speaker must have something to say. He 
 must feel the urge to say it. And then he must 
 yield not merely his voice but his whole body to 
 the task of saying it. 
 
 The small child does so. Therefore it is natural. 
 
 If the older person tries to do so, and yet fails 
 to get a natural response — if his body does not
 
 114 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 naturally and unconsciously perform the neces- 
 sary actions — it is because he has in some way 
 suppressed his body through restraint. His only 
 recourse is to remove that restraint ; to restore the 
 responsiveness of his body by exercising it wisely ; 
 and then to forget his body again and think of 
 what he has to say. 
 
 I have said that his case is not hopeless, that 
 Nature will help him recover his childhood 
 ability, or at least as much of it as he needs. How 
 then shall he go about it? By way of answer I 
 offer the following hints: 
 
 1. Let him strive in every possible way to increase 
 the pressure from within; that is, to so concentrate 
 his attention on what he has to say and the necessity 
 of saying it that he will forget himself and burst the 
 bonds of his self-restraint. He can do this best by 
 engaging in arguments and discussions, by speaking 
 of things he is really concerned about, by allowing 
 himself to grow enthusiaptic or angry. His teacher 
 can help stimulate his enthusiasm by giving response 
 to his thoughts and encouraging the discussion. Once 
 the pressure becomes strong enough the speaker's 
 body will respond by some kind of action, at least 
 intended to be expressive. 
 
 2. When the action so developed is expressive, and 
 when it does not distract or annoy his hearers, it is 
 right; and it is the duty of the teacher to let hira 
 alone. Self-conscious attention to things that are 
 right is just what must be avoided.
 
 ACTION 115 
 
 3. When the speaker's actions, though developed 
 spontaneously from the thought, are inadequate or 
 inexpressive because of his acquired inhibitions, the 
 teacher can help by judicious criticism of the things 
 that are wrong. If the student can be made conscious 
 of his worst faults but unconscious of his successes 
 — or rather of the means whereby he achieves suc- 
 cess — the former will become uncomfortable and the 
 latter comfortable, and he will eventually learn to 
 follow the pleasanter path. 
 
 4. If the student is seriously and persistently 
 awkward, he should strive to limber up his body 
 through the medium of good exercises — fencing, box- 
 ing, medicine ball work, and setting-up exercises, in- 
 cluding some good dancing steps. Such exercises, 
 taken on the side, will do more to teach him gesture 
 than all the gesture drill in the world. 
 
 5. If his chief difficulty is a strong aversion to 
 gesturing at all, the same treatment will help; aided 
 by the treatment prescribed to increase the pressure 
 from within. But this fault is not so common as 
 many believe, and is very rare in those who have 
 got past the first difficulties of nervousness and have 
 begun to " find themselves " on the platform. 
 
 Those who really have something to say and 
 the urge to say it seldom have any other diflBculty 
 with action than the one that Theodore Roosevelt 
 had ; namely, a tendency to settle into one or two 
 habits or mannerisms. In a young student this 
 fault can readily be corrected if the teacher will
 
 116 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 subject him to judicious criticism in such a way 
 as to make him self-conscious about his manner- 
 isms but not about his really good gestures. The 
 impulse from within will then be diverted from 
 the mannerisms to the more genuinely expressive 
 actions. The only danger is that the self-con- 
 sciousness will be applied in the wrong place, and 
 the good gestures checked; to guard against this 
 the wise teacher criticizes external things spar- 
 ingly, at the same time always emphasizing the 
 thought. 
 
 When once the speaker has freed himself of his 
 false mannerisms and acquired inhibitions, and 
 has something urgent to say, he will say it, not 
 alone with his voice, but with the expression of 
 his face, with his eyes and eyebrows, with his 
 shoulders, with the movements of his head and of 
 his whole body, with changes of posture and posi- 
 tion, with his feet, hands, and arms. And his 
 audience will get what he has to say almost as 
 much through his actions as through his words.
 
 Chapter XV 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 
 
 THE first questions a student of public 
 speaking asks are, " What shall I talk 
 about? " and " How shall I prepare? " I have de- 
 ferred the answers until now because they depend 
 in part upon the principles which we have been 
 considering. 
 
 In general, the best answer I can give to the 
 first question is, " Whatever you can best mo- 
 tivate," and I refer the student again to the dis- 
 cussion in Chapter IV. 
 
 It is all very well to say, " Choose something 
 you know about, something that interests you, 
 something that is appropriate to the occasion." 
 That is just what the speaker outside of the classr 
 room will try to do without being told. But it 
 does not help the student with his speeches in 
 class, because in the first place there isn't any 
 particular occasion, and in the second place after 
 he has addressed the same audience a number of 
 
 117
 
 118 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 times he begins to run out of topics that he is in- 
 terested in and knows all about — or at any rate 
 he thinks he is running out of them, which has 
 the same effect. 
 
 In class most students show an almost irresist- 
 ible tendency to choose informative topics, that 
 is, topics upon which they can speak with an in- 
 formative purpose. An informative purpose pre- 
 supposes some motive of authority on the part of 
 the speaker and some willingness to be informed 
 on the part of the audience, both of which quali- 
 ties are apt to be lacking in the routine work of 
 an ordinary college class. But so easy is it for the 
 student to fall back on some ready source of in- 
 formation like a magazine article, and then 
 simply relay that information second hand, that 
 the average student will do so rather than make 
 the necessary effort to find well motivated topics. 
 Then he struggles along in a hopeless effort to im- 
 part information that he really has not got to an 
 audience that does not want it. 
 
 I have not said, please note, that a student 
 should never speak informatively in class. I 
 have merely stated the fact that most informative 
 speeches are harder to motivate than speeches in- 
 tended to impress, or convince, or actuate; and
 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 119 
 
 that a speech must be well motivated to be 
 effective. 
 
 "-"There are obviously two ways of motivating a 
 class speech. One is to select a fool-proof topic 
 that motivates itself; which is the hardest way, 
 especially after the student has spoken many 
 times. The other is to use a little imagination and 
 ingenuity in order to motivate a topic that might 
 not carry itself without. It may help somewhat 
 if the student will bear in mind the following con- 
 tributory elements of good motivation : 
 
 1. Evidence of inside, or first-hand, information on 
 the part of the speaker, especially if rare or unusual. 
 
 2. Evidence of unusually broad and deep knowledge 
 of the subject, giving the impression of authority. 
 
 3. Evidence of enthusiasm for the subject on the 
 part of the speaker, tremendous and contagious. 
 
 4. Establishment of a bond of common interest in 
 the subject, uniting speaker and audience; it may 
 grow out of the nearness of the subject, or its 
 universality, or the fact that it has been discussed be- 
 fore in the same company. 
 
 5. Evident timeliness of the subject; its obvious 
 relation to some current situation or event. 
 
 6. Intrinsic interest of the subject, which I put 
 last because it is the least reliable; intrinsic interest 
 is not an absolute, but a relative thing, and many a 
 student is fooled by that fact. However, allowing 
 for the relativity, subjects do differ in degree of 
 probable interest.
 
 120 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 A thoughtful application of these principles 
 should help the student — or the teacher — to 
 pick out subjects suitable for classroom practice 
 in public speaking. By way of supplement, how- 
 ever, I offer, in Appendix C, a list of topics that 
 have been used successfully in class speeches, and 
 that will serve as suggestive examples, if nothing 
 more. 
 
 The second question, " How shall I prepare? " 
 calls for a qualified answer. No system of prep- 
 aration will do for every subject and every 
 speaker. 
 
 The first steps, of course, are fairly obvious. 
 One must master his subject himself before he can 
 hope to present it to others. He must have some- 
 thing to say, and he must have a great deal more 
 than he does say, else he will fail to show the 
 necessary reserve power. All this means, usually, 
 reading, study, and thought, followed by com- 
 position. 
 
 The best method ever devised for the gathering 
 and ordering of material is the separate leaf 
 method, whereby the speaker or writer takes his 
 original notes on small slips of paper of uniform 
 size, using a separate slip for each idea, and then
 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 121 
 
 assembles and arranges them after the manner 
 of a game of solitaire. This method gives the 
 greatest elasticity of rearrangement, permits easy 
 addition and subtraction of material, and avoids 
 duplication of effort. Experienced speakers and 
 writers seldom use any other. 
 
 Apart from method, there is one principle which 
 the speaker must observe in the preparation of 
 material if he is to attain any measure of success, 
 and that is the principle of thorough assimilation. 
 The process of absorbing ideas is not unlike the 
 digestive process. One first gathers articles of 
 food (ideas) and puts them into his mouth 
 (memory) . The articles may be of many different 
 kinds and from many different sources, but in the 
 process of digestion they are gradually mixed and 
 broken down through the agency of digestive 
 fluids (mental associations and reactions), until 
 they lose their original identity (authorship) and 
 become a single homogeneous mass (composition). 
 It is at this point — in the preparation of a speech 
 — that most students stop ; they have digested 
 their thoughts but have not yet assimilated them. 
 Food that is digested but not assimilated is simply 
 foreign matter inside the body; it is not part of 
 the man himself. So with thoughts. One may
 
 122 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 have studied them, mastered them, composed 
 them; yet they are not one's own until they have 
 been absorbed into the blood, so to speak; and 
 they are not fit material for public speaking until 
 they really are one's own. 
 
 Such are the inescapable first steps of prepara- 
 tion. " But," says the student, " how shall I 
 prepare my thoughts for delivery? Shall I write 
 them out and memorize them? Or shall I write 
 an outline and memorize that? Or shall I use a 
 few notes and speak extemporaneously? " 
 
 The answer is that he should use the method 
 best adapted to himself and to the occasion. My 
 advice is to try everything at least once; to ex- 
 periment and choose the best; but to experiment 
 intelligently, with due regard to the advantages 
 and limitations of each method. Some of the 
 more obvious of those advantages and limitations 
 may be set down here by way of suggestion, and 
 the student may find others for himself. 
 
 The advantages of writing out and memoriz- 
 ing a speech are : 
 
 1. It gives the best control over details of language. 
 
 2. It permits economy of expression, the elimina- 
 tion of dead wood. 
 
 3. It insures the speaker against leaving out im-
 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 123 
 
 portant points, or forgetting what he intended to say 
 — provided, always, that the memory does not fail. 
 4. It provides a correct text for record or publi- 
 cation. 
 
 The disadvantages are: 
 
 1. The tendency of a written speech to sound writ- 
 ten; that is, for the writer to employ the construction 
 and phraseology of written rather than spoken Eng- 
 lish — his writing rather than his speaking vocabu- 
 lary.^ Few students realize how different written 
 and spoken English really are, not only in vocabulary 
 but in construction and general style. Spoken 
 language is less formal, less finished, less literary; 
 it contains fewer complex and periodic sentences, but 
 more simple and compound and loose sentences; it 
 uses fewer strictly grammatical constructions and 
 more purely idiomatic ones. It does not depend upon 
 the written word alone, but leaves much to be con- 
 veyed by the inflections of the voice and the actions 
 of the body. 
 
 2. The difficulty of thinking when one is so busy 
 remembering; the audience feels and resents the sub- 
 stitution of a memory process for an active thinking 
 process on the part of the speaker, 
 
 3. The unreliability of the memory, and the fact 
 that when it fails unexpectedly one is stranded. 
 
 4. The simple fact that memorized speeches rarely 
 show thorough assimilation. 
 
 1 See Chapter XII.
 
 124 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 The advantages of extemporaneous speaking 
 from notes or outline are: 
 
 1. It is spontaneous and genuine, even in its 
 failures. 
 
 2. It sounds like speaking rather than reading. 
 
 3. It tends to make the speaker '' think on his 
 feet " instead of trying to remember what he thought 
 yesterday or the day before. 
 
 4. It permits of instantaneous modification or 
 adaptation to meet unexpected conditions. 
 
 The disadvantages are : 
 
 1. The tendency of many speakers to ramble, wast- 
 ing time and words to no purpose. 
 
 2. The difficulty of being sure that nothing is left 
 out in the excitement; that the speaker has really 
 said what he intended to say. 
 
 3. The clumsiness and uncertainty of extemporane- 
 ous language. 
 
 4. The temptation to neglect preparation and de- 
 pend on one's " gift of gab." 
 
 5. The absence of a text for record or publication. 
 
 6. The difficulty of keeping within the time limit 
 when there is one — a very vital matter, about which 
 most students are all too careless. To be cut off be- 
 fore one has reached his climax, or to be forced to 
 make a hasty, lame ending, is to have one's speech 
 utterly ruined; and there are many occasions in real 
 life when one is allowed only so many minutes to 
 speak.
 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 125 
 
 It is clear that many of the advantages and 
 disadvantages of both methods are conditional; 
 that modification of method may increase or de- 
 crease them. Most speakers have found that 
 some sort of a compromise is the best solution. 
 For example, one well known speaker prepares by 
 actually delivering his speech orally and extem- 
 poraneously to an imaginary audience, not once, 
 but many times, until he has it whipped into such 
 shape as to remove many of the disadvantages 
 of the extemporaneous method. Then he writes 
 it down, polishes it with a blue pencil, and finally 
 memorizes it — although by that time it needs 
 very little memorization. Another uses the same 
 method, but improves upon it by having a 
 stenographer take the speech down while he is 
 actually delivering it to the imaginary audience. 
 Both escape the worst disadvantages of both 
 methods and preserve the most important 
 
 advantages. 
 In my own classes I do not think I can attribute 
 
 ten bad speeches a year to thorough preparation 
 by the wrong method; but I can attribute twice 
 that number every week to inadequate prepara- 
 tion. The worst faults of the memorized speech 
 show up most clearly in the speech that is only
 
 126 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 half memorized — and not half assimilated. The 
 worst faults of the extemporaneous method show 
 up most in the speech that is extemporaneous in 
 thought as well as in text. Thorough prepara- 
 tion by any method will remove half the faults 
 of that method. Wise adaptation to circum- 
 stances will remove the other half. 
 
 One common fault in preparation irrespective 
 of method deserves special mention, because it is 
 due less to laziness than to a natural error of 
 judgment. That is the habit of preparing the 
 first part of the speech too well at the expense of 
 the last part. Nearly everybody falls into this 
 error. The student would do well to drill into 
 his head the golden maxim : " Prepare thoroughly 
 the last part of a speech and the first part will 
 prepare itself." 
 
 One more suggestion about preparation — 
 which applies to many things besides prepara- 
 tion — and I have finished. 
 
 Let the student remember that the best way 
 to work out his thoughts for effective public 
 speaking is by talking them over with somebody 
 else. He cannot prepare his speeches and he can- 
 not prepare himself by sulking in a corner. Speak- 
 ing is not an individual but a communal func-
 
 METHODS OF PREPARATION 127 
 
 tion. There may be human activities that can 
 be learned in a hermitage through solitary medi- 
 tation, but public speaking is not one of them. 
 If the student is timid and afraid to meet people, 
 his first task is to overcome that feeling in every- 
 day life. To communicate effectively with other 
 men he must know other men, and he must get 
 used to the feeling of having them know hhn. 
 To develop a thought most effectively for sharing 
 with others he must seek the reactions of others 
 to that thought. And to perfect himself in the 
 useful art that is expanded conversation, he must 
 expand himself through conversation.
 
 APPENDIX A 
 
 VOCAL EXERCISES 
 
 General Instructions. — The exercises listed below 
 are few in number, but are carefully selected to correct 
 the commonest faults which are capable of correction 
 by such means. 
 
 Do not attempt to do all the exercises, but select — 
 preferably with the aid of a competent teacher — the 
 particular ones which seem to fit your individual case. 
 Practice them carefully at least once a day, five or ten 
 minutes at a time. Always stop and rest at the first 
 sign of dizziness or fatigue. Never persist in an exer- 
 cise that gives you a sense of strain or discomfort, 
 especially in the throat; if you cannot find out what 
 is wrong seek help of someone who can. The presence 
 of strain in the throat is a sure sign that harm, not 
 good, is being done. 
 
 Practice when you are in the mood for relaxation, 
 yet are not physically fatigued. Have the window 
 open, if possible; at any rate avoid badly vitiated 
 atmosphere. Stand erect, but with an easy natural 
 posture, free from stiffness. Try to cultivate a sense 
 of freedom and exhilaration in doing the exercises. 
 Do not think of the anatomy of the throat. Remem- 
 ber that in correct voice production one is uncon- 
 scious of the throat. If you must strain something, 
 strain the heavy muscles about the waistline. 
 
 129
 
 130 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 If you happen to catch a cold or sore throat, keep 
 up the breathing exercises, but omit the exercises in 
 vocahzation, or such of them as cause you any dis- 
 comfort. Avoid abuse of the voice at all times; 
 do not shout yourself hoarse, or sing beyond your 
 range, or sing falsetto. Remember that a few brief 
 exercises cannot compete with hours and hours of 
 daily abuse. Endeavor always to build up a healthy, 
 vigorous body; good speaking voices are seldom found 
 in individuals of poor physique. 
 
 No matter what other exercises you do, always begin 
 with No. 1, and end with No. 2. 
 
 I. BREATHING EXERCISES 
 
 Note. — The chief qualities to work for in breath- 
 ing are fullness and freedom. The reactions to guard 
 against are dizziness and fatigue. Because the lungs 
 have no motive power of their own, but are actuated 
 by muscles around and below them, you are often 
 taught that correct breathing is done not with the 
 lungs but with the diaphragm. So far as sensation 
 goes, breathing is done with the lungs, all parts of the 
 lungs, including the much neglected lower parts. By 
 a curious trick of nature you feel, when you inhale 
 correctly, as if the air came up through your body 
 instead of down through your throat. But it is as 
 natural to think of breathing with the lungs as to 
 think of blowing a fire with a bellows, 
 
 1. Exercise to wash out the lungs. — Exhale slowly, 
 bending forward from the waist with the arms ex- 
 tended towards the toes and the shoulders rounded so 
 as to compress the lungs and force the air out. Empty
 
 APPENDIX A 131 
 
 the lungs as completely as possible without discomfort. 
 Inhale to full capacity as you come back to the erect 
 position. Repeat three times. 
 
 2. Relaxation exercise. — Inhale deeply, raising 
 the arms over the head. Relax, and exhale slowly, 
 simulating a hearty but silent yawn, and letting the 
 arms fall limply at the sides. Repeat three times. 
 
 3. Simple breathing exercise. — Inhale deeply, 
 keeping the shoulders back and raising the arms over 
 the head to a vertical position. Do not hold the 
 breath, but begin exhaling immediately without clos- 
 ing the passages; exhale slowly and evenly, bringing 
 the arms down, and stopping when the body feels 
 relaxed. Do not force the exhalation or empty the 
 lungs. Repeat six times. 
 
 4. Exercise to lower the breathing center. — Ex- 
 hale, allowing the head to droop forward and the body 
 to hang perfectly limp down to the waistline. Then, 
 keeping the body and neck still limp, inhale deeply 
 from the bottom upward (at least it should feel so) 
 until the force of the air straightens the body and neck 
 and lifts the head up to an erect position. Try to 
 feel as limp as a toy balloon; let the air do the work 
 of straightening you up, not your muscles. Repeat 
 six times. 
 
 5. Breath reserve exercise. — Inhale deeply. Ex- 
 hale partially, letting only about one third of the breath 
 go and keeping the rest in reserve. Inhale again to 
 full capacity; let one third go, inhale again, and repeat 
 six times. Rest a few seconds and repeat again six 
 times. 
 
 6. Breath capacity exercise. — Fill the lungs by 
 inhaling a little air at a time in a succession of quick
 
 132 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 jerks, packing the lungs tight after each jerk, and let- 
 ting no air escape. When the lungs are full, close the 
 valve, so to speak, and hold the air for about five 
 seconds. Then release it suddenly and relax. Rest 
 before repeating. Repeat six times. 
 
 7. Breath control exercise. — Inhale in a succes- 
 sion of quick jerks as in Exercise 6, but avoid packing 
 the air after each jerk, that is, avoid closing the valve 
 in the throat. Hold the air instead by controlling 
 from the center of the body, and as soon as the lungs 
 are full begin exhaling slowly and evenly as in Exer- 
 cise 3. Rest before repeating. Repeat six times. 
 
 8. Abdominal exercise. — (To strengthen the ab- 
 dominal muscles and associate them with breath con- 
 trol.) Strain the muscles about and above the waistline 
 as if trying to burst a tight corset; but be moderate; 
 the object is not to induce apoplexy. Keeping the 
 muscles tense, inhale as deeply as you can with com- 
 fort, exhale, and repeat three or four times. At the 
 first hint of dizziness, stop, relax, and rest. Then 
 repeat. 
 
 9. Diaphragm exercise. — (To limber up the dia- 
 phragm and stimulate the lower lobes of the lungs.) 
 Take a moderately full breath; then using the nasal 
 passages only inhale and exhale rapidly and repeatedly 
 like a dog panting. At the first hint of dizziness, 
 stop, relax, and rest. Then repeat. 
 
 10. Expulsive exercise. — (To assist in developing 
 force of utterance.) Inhale deeply, then instantly expel 
 the breath on the sound of H. Be forceful within 
 reason, but do not turn yourself inside out. Do not 
 attempt to empty the lungs completely. Be sure that 
 the lower portion of the lungs plays a part in the
 
 APPENDIX A 133 
 
 expulsion, and that you feel the muscular activity 
 more at the waistline than at the shoulders and neck. 
 Repeat six times. 
 
 11. Breath economy exercise. — Inhale deeply. Pre- 
 pare to exhale on the sound of H; then exhale so 
 slowly that the sound is practically inaudible. Seek 
 to make the exhalation very even, smooth, and gentle; 
 so gentle that it will not extinguish a Hghted match. 
 Avoid all strain, and do not empty the lungs beyond 
 the point of relaxation. Regulate by muscular con- 
 trol from the center of the body, and not by squeezing 
 the throat. Repeat six times. 
 
 II. EXERCISES IN VOCALIZATION 
 
 Note. — Correct vocalization presupposes correct 
 breathing, and depends also upon freedom from throat 
 strain and fullness of resonance. With the aid of a 
 piano determine your natural range of voice; then 
 strike off two whole notes at the top and two at the 
 bottom, and confine all your exercises to the middle 
 portion remaining (unless instructed otherwise by a 
 competent teacher). Choose the easiest tone of all as 
 the starting point. Be easy on the voice at all times, 
 avoiding strain and abuse. Do not shout yourself 
 hoarse at the football games, unless you wish to make 
 a deliberate and perhaps permanent sacrifice in the 
 interest of school spirit. Do not sing beyond your 
 range, even in fun. Do not use your voice when you 
 have a sore throat, and remember always that pain 
 in the throat is a sure sign that harm is being done. 
 
 12. Exercise for ease. — Inhale deeply but lazily; 
 open the mouth wide, and yawn prodigiously, saying,
 
 134 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Ah, hah, hoh, hum! with freedom and abandon. 
 Do not repeat, but finish off instead with Exercise 3, 
 repeated three times. 
 
 13. Forwarding exercise. — Speak the following 
 sounds naturally and in the given order: Oo, oh, aw, 
 ah, a (as in at). Repeat ten times. Note that the 
 mouth tends to open wider with each sound in the 
 series, and that the focus of the tone seems to move 
 forward; the oo feels down in the throat, the oh in 
 the back of the mouth, the aw in the center of the 
 mouth, the ah in the front of the mouth just back of 
 the teeth, and the a almost out of the mouth. When 
 you have made certain of this feehng, speak the 
 sounds in reverse order, striving to keep the tone 
 forward in the mouth as much as possible without 
 losing the quality of the vowels. Repeat five times. 
 
 14. Humming exercise. — (To assist in forwarding 
 and to develop head resonance.) Take a full easy 
 breath, and choosing a fairly low pitch hum a full 
 round tone on the sound of M. Keep the tone well 
 forward in the head, so that the bones of the forehead 
 and upper jaw vibrate. Keep the lips lightly closed, 
 and note the tickling sensation at the point of contact, 
 caused by the vibration. Repeat until you get a good 
 tone easily. Then, using the original low tone as do 
 of the scale, hum a series of simple exercises corre- 
 sponding to do, re, do; do, re, mi, re, do; and so on, 
 one note higher each time, but not beyond your range. 
 Do not pronounce the syllables, however; keep the 
 lips closed and hum on the sound of M, with the tone 
 well forward in the head. Repeat twice. 
 
 15. Resonance exercise. — Take a full easy breath, 
 and choosing a fairly low pitch sing the syllable mum
 
 APPENDIX A 135 
 
 rapidly and repeatedly as long as the breath lasts. 
 Repeat, one note higher in the scale each time, until 
 you reach the octave above, or until it threatens to 
 become uncomfortable. On each repeat start rapidly, 
 say five syllables per second, and slow down as you 
 near the end of your breath; but keep up the volume 
 of sound until you stop and stop soon enough to make 
 this possible. Try to feel that the breath comes up 
 through the body, and that the tone is produced in 
 the front of the head. Try to develop a good tone, 
 pleasing to the ear. Above all, be sure that there is a 
 continuous flow of sound from start to finish, the M 
 being carried over from syllable to syllable. 
 
 16. Exercise to correct breathiness. — Take a full 
 easy breath, choose a comfortable middle pitch and 
 sing on Ah. Sustain the tone, applying the air very 
 gently, and using as little as possible. Do not try to 
 sing very loud ; aim to increase the purity of the tone, 
 just as a flute player would — that is, by appljdng 
 just enough air at just the right pressure, and wasting 
 none. When you succeed you should get a full clear 
 tone, with good carrying power, yet with so little ex- 
 penditure of breath that you can hold a lighted match 
 just in front of the mouth without extinguishing it; 
 you should be able to sustain the tone for twenty-five 
 seconds on one breath. Repeat six times. Try a 
 higher or lower pitch occasionally. 
 
 17. Exercise to correct nasality. — Hum a middle 
 tone on M, well forward in the head; then alternate 
 with a full open Ah on a, continuous flow of breath. 
 Then hold the Ah, and with the thumb and forefinger 
 alternately pinch and release the nose. Note the vari- 
 ation of sound. Now change the quahty of the Ah
 
 136 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 tone until the pinching makes no difference in the 
 quality. Practice this tone until you get it easily, still 
 keeping the tone forward in the head, however. Fi- 
 nally, practice alternating the two types oi Ah tone 
 ten or twelve times. (This exercise will not cure all 
 kinds of nasality, but it will help the teacher diagnose 
 your case. Do not fail to report results to the 
 teacher.) 
 
 18. Intonation exercise. — (To correct the habit of 
 talking in consonants only; helps also to correct 
 breathiness and harshness.) Choose a common expres- 
 sion such as "I am very pleased to make your ac- 
 quaintance," or "How are the folks at home today?" 
 and intone it — chant it, half sing it. Do not stick to 
 a monotone, but use a simple tune or melody on two 
 or three easy notes. Change the tune with each repeti- 
 tion. Choose a different expression each day, varying 
 the selection with proverbs and with bits of verse in 
 different moods. Seek musical rather than emotional 
 effect (Compare with Exercise 19). Play with the 
 selection. Be careful not to strain. Repeat ten times, 
 and on the last repetition come back to a normal, 
 natural inflection, speaking the selection as you would 
 in real life. 
 
 19. Exercise for expressiveness of voice. — Select a 
 short lyric poem, expressing some deep, or tender, or 
 hilarious, or violent feeling, and read it aloud several 
 times, aiming to throw your whole soul into it. Do 
 not be afraid to exaggerate a little; put in plenty of 
 "sob stuff" — tear the passion to tatters. Do the 
 exercise when you are alone, of course; barricade your 
 door and cut loose. Choose a different selection each 
 day; run the gamut of emotions from extreme pathos
 
 APPENDIX A 137 
 
 to extreme mirth; but keep them distinct, and know 
 which is which. Try to feel the emotion in each case, 
 deeply and sincerely. Bring the tears to your own 
 eyes by the sound of your voice. (Note that this is 
 not advice to be followed in public, but a private 
 exercise for unexpressive voices.) 
 
 20. Pitch correction exercise. — Take an easy sen- 
 tence of your own and repeat it several times, speaking 
 it naturally. Then intone it in monotone, aiming to 
 preserve the same average pitch as in the spoken sen- 
 tence. This is difficult, but can be done after a little 
 practice. Repeat until you have it. Then find the 
 key on the piano which corresponds to the pitch of the 
 sentence. Strike the key, repeat the intoned sentence 
 several times, and then strike the key below (if your 
 voice is too high) or above (if your voice is too low), 
 and intone the sentence on the new pitch. Repeat 
 several times. Then speak the sentence with the new 
 pitch as an average. After two or three days bring 
 the pitch down (or up) two notes instead of one. 
 When you have established the pitch where you want 
 it, start over again with another sentence. (The help 
 of a teacher is almost essential with this exercise.) 
 
 21. Exercise for force and variety. — Shout each of 
 the following syllables vigorously on a separate breath: 
 Hu-p, hee, hay, haw, hah, hoh, hoo. Do not strain, 
 however. Then take a sentence of expository or argu- 
 mentative nature, carefully pick out the words deserv- 
 ing of emphasis, and speak the sentence giving exag- 
 gerated force to those words. Give greatest force to 
 the one word that seems to be the key-word of the 
 sentence. Repeat with other sentences. Pound the 
 desk or lectern with your fist to emphasize your shouts.
 
 138 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 III. ARTICULATION EXERCISES 
 
 Note. — The whole secret of articulation exercises 
 is in doing them carefully and slowly enough for 
 accuracy. Think of the meaning, and let speed take 
 care of itseK. Seek frequent criticisms from the teacher, 
 for you cannot judge your own articulation satisfac- 
 torily. Remember that you must know how a word 
 ought to be pronounced — a matter of vocabulary — 
 before you can learn to enunciate it correctly. If 
 possible, have some one at home check you up con- 
 stantly on both pronunciation and enunciation, es- 
 pecially on vowel quality. You need more frequent 
 reminders than the teacher can give you. 
 
 Flexibility Exercises 
 
 22. Speak in rotation the syllables ee, ah, oo, exag- 
 gerating the lip movements slightly. Repeat ten times. 
 
 23. Speak in rotation the syllables it, ip, ik, dis- 
 tinguishing them clearly. Repeat ten times. 
 
 24. Speak in rotation the syllables are, oh, dee, 
 exaggerating the lip movements slightly. Repeat ten 
 times. 
 
 25. Speak in rotation the syllables kew, pee, tee, 
 distinctly, with exaggeration, but without stiffness. 
 Repeat ten times. 
 
 26. Speak in rotation the syllables ell, oh, em, 
 exaggerating the lip movements slightly. Repeat ten 
 times.
 
 APPENDIX A 139 
 
 Enunciation Exercises 
 
 27. Demosthenes' exercise. — With two or three 
 small pebbles in the mouth speak a fairly long sentence 
 as clearly and distinctly as possible. Repeat until you 
 have mastered the sentence. Choose a new sentence 
 each day. This is an old and hackneyed exercise, 
 originally intended to overcome stammering, but it is 
 still very useful for all-round improvement of enuncia- 
 tion. The principle is very simple: to stimulate the 
 will power and strengthen the control by increasing 
 the difficulty to be overcome; it is the same principle 
 the baseball player uses when he swings two bats just 
 before going to the plate. You can design an exercise 
 on this same principle to help you fight almost any 
 bad habit. 
 
 28. Exercise to correct "mushy" enunciation. — 
 (Speak the following as distinctly as possible : She shuns 
 the seashore since she saw the sea shells shining in the 
 sun. Repeat ten times. Change every two or three 
 days to a new sentence involving the consonants that 
 tend to sound mushy. Aim always at freedom and 
 clearness; never at speed. 
 
 29. Exercise to correct slurring. — Speak the fol- 
 lowing as clearly and distinctly as possible: A statis- 
 tician protests that the Constitution has been too fre- 
 quently attacked. Repeat ten times. Change every 
 two or three days to a new sentence involving the 
 difficult combinations of consonants — st, ts, pr, fr, 
 th, kt, skt, dst, str, tr, tl, etc. 
 
 30. Exercise in finishing sounds. — Speak the fol- 
 lowing as clearly and distinctly as possible: Clayton
 
 140 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 kept a kind of cat, and Howard asked him for it. Repeat 
 ten times. Change every two or three days to a new 
 sentence involving plenty of syllables ending in t, d, k, 
 etc. 
 
 31. Auxiliary exercise. — With the aid of a mirror 
 — or better, of a friend — practice silent enunciation 
 and lip reading a few minutes every day. (Used alone 
 this exercise will produce exaggerated lip movements; 
 but used judiciously in combination with others it 
 will help to encourage distinctness.) 
 
 Pronunciation Exercises. 
 
 (To correct a few common habitual mispronun- 
 ciations, only; most cases of mispronunciation being 
 matters of vocabulary.) 
 
 32. Exercise on long u. — Speak the following cor- 
 rectly and clearly: To assume that the moon is the 
 cause of lunacy is absolutely ridiculous and supremely 
 stupid. Repeat ten times. Change occasionally to 
 another sentence involving long u. 
 
 33. Exercise on oi and er. — Speak the following 
 correctly and clearly: The girl did boil the bird in oil; 
 the oily bird was early boiled. Repeat ten times. 
 
 34. Exercise on r. — Speak the following under fre- 
 quent criticism by the teacher: Nowhere in American 
 letters do we find a dramatist worthy of comparison with 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 35. Exercise on th, — Speak the following as it is 
 spelled : De guns tundered troo de tick of de fight, and 
 we knew dat de flag was still dere. Now speak it cor- 
 rectly: The guns thundered through the thick of the 
 fight, and we knew that the flag was still there. Repeat 
 five times each.
 
 APPENDIX A 141 
 
 Note. — The student or teacher may readily devise 
 similar exercises for the correction of other faults in 
 articulation so that no more need be offered here. In 
 general it may be said that earnestness of effort and 
 deliberateness of manner will correct almost any 
 fault of articulation yet discovered, barring only those 
 due to serious physical malformation or to psycho- 
 pathic conditions.
 
 APPENDIX B 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 I. FOR THE FURTHER STUDY OF PUBLIC 
 
 SPEAKING 
 
 Note. — The following does not purport to be a 
 complete bibliography of speech subjects; it is merely 
 a list of two or three of the best books now available 
 in each of the several fields most closely related to the 
 student's problem of self -training for public speaking. 
 
 In Public Speaking 
 
 * 
 
 Winans, J. A. Public Speaking 
 
 The best comprehensive work on all phases of the 
 
 subject. 
 Phillips, A. E. Effective Speaking 
 
 A standard work on the content and composition 
 
 of the speech. 
 Woolbert, C. H. Fundamentals of Speech 
 
 A scientific analysis of the speech function in all 
 
 of its phases; indispensable to those who expect 
 
 to teach. 
 
 In Voice Culture 
 
 Lankow, E. How to Breathe Right 
 
 A httle book of principles and exercises; very 
 helpful. 
 
 142
 
 APPENDIX B 143 
 
 Herman, R. L. An Open Door for Singers 
 
 A book of fundamental principles which hold good 
 
 for speakers as well as singers; few books state 
 
 them as clearly. 
 Curry, S. S. Mind and Voice 
 
 The safest and sanest of the comprehensive books 
 
 on voice. 
 Mosher, J. A. The Effective Speaking Voice 
 
 A recent, smaller book, with much condensed 
 
 information. 
 
 In Language and Vocabulary 
 
 In addition to regular textbooks in composition and 
 
 rhetoric the following are suggested: 
 
 Greenough and Kittridge's Words and their Ways in 
 EngUsh Speech 
 
 Femald's Connectives of English Speech 
 
 Krapp's Elements of English Grammar 
 
 Phj^e's Eighteen Thousand Words Often Mispro- 
 nounced 
 
 Lomer and Ashmun's Study and Practice of Writing 
 Enghsh 
 
 Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases 
 
 Wilstach's Dictionary of Similes 
 
 In Argumentation and Debate 
 
 Baker, G. P. and Huntington, H. B. Principles of 
 Argumentation 
 
 The standard text; a little difficult to read, but 
 excellent for study. 
 O'Neill, Laycock, and Scales. Argumentation and 
 Debate
 
 144 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 The old Laycock and Scales revised, and the most 
 
 readable book on the subject. 
 Foster, W. T. Argumentation and Debating 
 
 A good all-round book, widely used. 
 Covington, H. F. Fundamentals of Debate 
 
 A totally different treatment, from an imaginative 
 
 point of view. 
 Maxcy, C. L. The Brief 
 
 A useful study of both legal and argimientative 
 
 brief-drawing. 
 
 In the Literature of Public Speaking 
 
 The World's Best Orations (10 vols.) Ed. by D. J. 
 Brewer. 
 
 The World's Famous Orations (10 vols., small) Ed. 
 by W. J. Bryan. 
 
 An inexpensive set containing most of the great 
 speeches of the world, some abridged. Very few 
 recent speeches. 
 
 Modern Eloquence (13 vols.) Ed. by T. B. Reed. 
 
 Another large set, including more speeches of 
 recent decades. 
 
 Models of Speech Composition Ed. by J. M. O'Neill. 
 The only satisfactory one-volume collection; 95 
 complete speeches, ancient, modern, and contem- 
 porary. 
 
 In Allied Studies Directly Useful to the Student of 
 
 Public Speaking 
 
 Aristotle. Rhetoric 
 
 The foundation of much that has been written 
 since.
 
 APPENDIX B 145 
 
 Jevons, W. S. Lessons in Logic 
 
 The best known text in this subject. 
 
 Coppee, H. Elements of Logic 
 
 An excellent book, clearer, more practical, and 
 more readable than Jevons. 
 
 Euclid. Elements of Geometry- 
 Two thousand years old, but the best book on 
 the subject, and highly useful to the student of 
 argumentation. 
 
 Chauvenet, Wm. Treatise on Elementary Geometry 
 One of the best modern works. 
 
 James, Wm. Principles of Psychology 
 
 A famous treatise, full of knowledge directly use- 
 ful to the speaker. 
 
 Bassett, L. E. Handbook of Oral Reading 
 
 The best book on a subject in which the speaker 
 should be proficient. 
 
 The Quarterly Journal of Speech Education. Ed. by 
 C. H. Woolbert. 
 
 The one important periodical on public speaking 
 and alUed subjects, and indispensable to the 
 teacher. Published by the National Association 
 of Teachers of Speech, R. K. Immel, University 
 of Michigan, Treasurer. 
 
 IL FOR REFERENCE 
 
 Note. — Only a few of the most important reference 
 books are here listed, together with a few concise and 
 inexpensive volumes which the student may wish to 
 place on his own shelves.
 
 146 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Dictionaries and Encyclopedias 
 
 A New English Dictionary (Oxford Dictionary) 
 
 The largest and most authoritative. No student 
 
 can afford to be unacquainted with this great 
 
 work. 
 The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia 
 
 The second best dictionary, and the best American. 
 Webster's International Dictionary 
 The best one-volume dictionary. 
 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 
 
 One of the best in desk size. 
 The Concise Oxford Dictionary 
 
 Inexpensive; desk size. Abridged from the New 
 
 English Dictionary. 
 Encyclopedia Britannica 
 
 Too well known to need description. 
 New International Encyclopedia 
 
 Inferior to the Britannica in many respects, but 
 
 a little more evenly balanced and more inclusive. 
 
 Handbooks of Allusion 
 
 A Reader's Handbook (Brewer) 
 
 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Brewer) 
 
 A Smaller Classical Dictionary (Smith) (In Everyman's 
 
 Library) 
 A Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology (Edwardes) 
 
 (In Everyman's Library) 
 Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (Hoyt) 
 Familiar Quotations (Bartlett)
 
 APPENDIX B 147 
 
 Historical and Statistical Information 
 
 Ploetz, C. Manual (formerly Epitome) of Universal 
 History 
 
 The world's history in chronological outline. 
 Putnam, G. P. Handbook of Universal History 
 Universal Atlas of the World 
 Cyclopedia of American Government (3 vols.) 
 Cyclopedia of Political Economy and U. S. History 
 
 (3 vols.) 
 The Statesman's Year Book (annual) 
 The Anglo-American Year Book (annual) 
 The World Almanac (annual) 
 Who's Who in America (annual) 
 The Women's Who's Who of America 
 Dictionary of National Biography 
 
 The standard biographical dictionary of England. 
 National Cyclopedia of American Biography 
 
 The American counterpart. 
 Lippuicott's Pronouncing Biographical Dictionary 
 
 A smaller general work (2 vols) 
 
 Bibliographical Guides and Indexes 
 
 Publishers' Trade List Annual 
 
 Annual price list of American publications. 
 United States Catalog of Books in Print (and Supple- 
 ments) 
 
 A permanent list of contemporary American booka 
 Reference Catalog of Current Literature 
 
 A similar list of English publications. 
 Poole's Index to Periodical Literature 
 
 Well known and useful, but only up to 190Gr.
 
 148 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature 
 
 Has replaced Poole in recent years; name recently 
 
 changed to 
 International Index to Periodicals 
 
 III. FOR THE GENERAL EDUCATION OF THE 
 
 SPEAKER 
 
 Note. — The titles here listed are intended merely 
 to suggest some of the lines of reading most likely 
 to assist the student in the sort of self-development 
 without which a man has little right to claim the 
 leadership of thought implied in public speaking. The 
 regular formal textbooks which the student is most 
 apt to meet in his various courses have been purposely 
 excluded as taken for granted. No attempt has been 
 made to cover each field completely; that is left to 
 the textbooks. The books mentioned have been se- 
 lected for their established greatness, or for their 
 direct usefulness in furnishing thought-material; either, 
 or both. 
 
 For Historical Background 
 
 Wells, H. G. Outline of History 
 
 Van Loon, H. Story of Mankind 
 
 Thucydides. History of the Pcloponnesian War 
 
 Plutarch. Lives of Illustrious Men 
 
 Grote, G. History of Greece 
 
 Gibbon, E. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 
 
 Carlyle, T. The French Revolution 
 
 Green, J. R. Short History of the English People 
 
 McMaster, J. B. History of the American People
 
 APPENDIX B 149 
 
 For Scientific Background 
 
 Thomson, J. A. Outline of Science 
 
 Pearson, K. Grammar of Science 
 
 Bacon, F. Novum Organum, and Advancement of 
 
 Learning 
 Max-Miiller, F. The Science of Thought 
 Darwin, C. The Origin of Species 
 Huxley, H. Man's Place in Nature 
 Haeckel, E. The Evolution of Man 
 
 For Political, Economic, and Social Background 
 
 Plato. Republic 
 Aristotle. Politics 
 
 Economics 
 Machiavelli, N. The Prince 
 More, Sir T. Utopia 
 Rousseau, J. J. The Social Contract 
 Smith, A. The Wealth of Nations 
 George, H. Progress and Poverty 
 MiU, J. S. Liberty 
 Spencer, H. Principles of Sociology 
 Maine, H. S. Popular Government 
 Bryce, J. The American Commonwealth 
 
 For Philosophical and Religious Background ^ 
 
 The Bible. Analytical edition in Everyman's Li- 
 brary. 
 Plato. Dialogues 
 Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics 
 Poetics
 
 150 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Spinoza, B. de Ethics 
 
 Locke, J. Letters on Toleration 
 
 Paine, T. Age of Reason 
 
 Drummond, H. Natural Law in the Spiritual World 
 
 Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra 
 
 Schopenhauer, A. Essays 
 
 Lodge, Sir O. The Survival of Man 
 
 James, Wm. Human Immortality 
 
 Maeterlinck, M. The Great Secret 
 
 Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy 
 
 For Literary Background 
 
 No brief list of the world's greatest books could 
 possibly satisfy anybody, even the compiler; but I 
 challenge the student to read the twenty-five here 
 listed (or twenty-five better ones) without showing 
 some signs of literary background. 
 
 The Bible, King James Version 
 
 Shakespeare's Plays 
 
 Homer's Iliad 
 
 Chaucer, G. Canterbury Tales 
 
 Bunyan, J. The Pilgrim's Progress 
 
 The Arabian Nights 
 
 Cervantes, M. Don Quixote 
 
 Fielding, H. Tom Jones 
 
 Defoe, D. Robinson Crusoe 
 
 Goldsmith, O. The Vicar of Wakefield 
 
 Bums, R. Poems 
 
 Goethe, J. W. von Faust 
 
 Boswell, J. Life of Johnson 
 
 Scott, Sir W. Ivanhoc 
 
 Dickens, C. Tale of Two Cities
 
 APPENDIX B 151 
 
 Thackeray, W. M. Vanity Fair 
 
 Tennyson, A. Idylls of the King 
 
 Dumas, A. The Three Musketeers 
 
 Hugo, V. Les Miserables 
 
 Stevenson, R. L. Treasure Island 
 
 Eliot, G. Silas Marner 
 
 Hawthorne, N. House of Seven Gables 
 
 Poe, E. A. Tales of Mystery and Imagination 
 
 Meredith, G. Richard Feveril 
 
 Hardy, T. Far from the Madding Crowd 
 
 IV FOR SUGGESTION AND SOURCE OF 
 MATERIAL 
 
 Books (other than fiction) that Have Provoked 
 Discussion 
 
 Chesterton, G. K. What's Wrong with the World 
 Ferrero, G. Ancient Rome and Modern America 
 Lodge, Sir O. Raymond 
 
 Roosevelt, T. Fear God and Take Your Own Part 
 Thayer, W.R. Democracy: Discipline: Peace 
 Bok, E. The Americanization of Edward Bok 
 Mirrors of Washington (Anonymous) 
 Stoddard, L. The Rising Tide of Color 
 
 The Revolt Against Civilization 
 Wells, H. G. The War of the Civilizations 
 Russell, B. Bolshevism: Practice and Theory 
 Rathenau, W. The New Society 
 Lewisohn, L. Up Stream 
 Hutchmson, H. G. The Fortnightly Club 
 Sanger, M. The Pivot of Civilization
 
 152 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Stimulating Essays and Collections of Essays 
 
 Emerson, R. W. Conduct of Life, and other essays. 
 
 Eliot, C. W. Training for an Effective Life 
 
 Bennett, A. How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a 
 Day 
 
 Briggs, Le B. Essays on College Life 
 
 Benson, A. C. From a College Window 
 
 Huneker, G. G. Iconoclasts 
 
 Meredith, G. Comedy and the Comic Spirit 
 
 Perry, B. The American Mind 
 
 Chesterton, G. K. Things I Saw in America 
 
 Shaw, G. B. The Case for Equality 
 
 Bok, E. Why I Believe in Poverty 
 
 Lindsay, B. B. The Doughboy's Religion 
 
 Maeterlinck, M, Death 
 
 Modern Essays, Ed. by Berdan, Schultz, and Joyce 
 Widely varied, thought-provoking essays by many 
 authors. 
 
 Modern Essays, Ed. by Christopher Morley 
 
 Essays for College Men, Ed. by Norman Foerster 
 
 Same, Second Series, Ed, by Foerster, Man- 
 chester and Young 
 
 Representative Essays in Modern Thought, Ed. by 
 Steeves and Ristine 
 
 Selected Essays, Ed. by C. M. Fuess 
 
 Civilization in the U. S., Ed. by H. E. Stearns 
 
 Modern Novels that Have Aroused Discussion 
 
 Hardy, T. Tess of the D'Urbervilles 
 Butler, S. The Way of All Flesh 
 Poole, E. The Harbor
 
 APPENDIX B 153 
 
 Gissing, G. Demos 
 
 Chesterton, G. K. Manalive 
 
 Sinclair, U. The Jungle 
 
 Wells, H. G. The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon 
 
 Lewis, S. Main Street 
 
 Hutchinson, A. S. M. If Winter Comes 
 
 Churchill, W. The Inside of the Cup 
 
 Galsworthy, J. The Forsyte Saga 
 
 Dos Passos, J. R. Three Soldiers 
 
 Fitzgerald, F. S. The Beautiful and Damned 
 
 Stribling, T. S. Birthright 
 
 Modern Plays that Have Aroused Discussion 
 
 Ibsen, H. The Doll's House, Pillars of Society, Ghosts 
 Shaw, G. B. Man and Superman, The Doctor's 
 
 Dilemma 
 Jones, H. A. Michael and His Lost Angel 
 Barrie, J. M. The Admirable Crichton, Mary Rose 
 Bennett, A. Milestones 
 Mitchell, L. The New York Idea 
 Houghton, S. Hindle Wakes 
 Ficke, A. D. Mr. Faust 
 
 Galsworthy, J. Strife, Justice, The Skin Game 
 Barker, G. The Madras House 
 Glaspell, S. Inheritors 
 
 Tarkington, B. and Wilson, H. L. The Gibson Upright 
 Dane, C. A Bill of Divorcement 
 Molnar, F. The Devil, Liliom 
 O'Neill, E. The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, The 
 
 Hairy Ape
 
 154 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Poems that Suggest Ideas for Discussion 
 
 Wordsworth, W. Ode on Intimations of Immortality 
 Tennyson, A. Locksley Hall 
 Whitman, W. Leaves of Grass 
 Thompson, F. The Hound of Heaven 
 Hardy, T. Wessex Poems 
 Frost, R. North of Boston 
 Masters, E. L. Spoon River Anthology 
 Noyes, A. What Grandfather Said, Five Criticisms, 
 Touchstone on a Bus, A BaUad of the Easiest Way 
 
 Periodicals 
 
 Note. — Articles not yet published in book form 
 have been excluded from all the above hsts; yet many 
 of the best suggestions for speeches are to be found 
 in such articles. For that reason the student is urged 
 to keep posted on the contents of all current periodi- 
 cals. The following are especially useful : 
 The Congressional Record. The one completely un- 
 biased and uncensored publication; published daily 
 by the Government; full of basic material on all 
 current topics of national scope. 
 The Literary Digest. An impartial weekly review and 
 
 pool of press opinion. 
 Review of Reviews. An old-established monthly re- 
 view. 
 The Christian Science Monitor. A newspaper that 
 tries to be national in scope and balanced in interest. 
 Current Opinion. Another monthly review, with 
 
 special articles. 
 The Outlook. A review, but with editorial policy 
 and special articles.
 
 APPENDIX B 155 
 
 The Atlantic Monthly. A treasury of thoughtful 
 
 articles. 
 The Dial. A liberal forum, with a literary bent. 
 The New Republic. A discussion paper appealing 
 
 especially to discontented intellectuals. 
 The Nation. Another. 
 The American Magazine. Exactly opposite in spirit.
 
 APPENDIX C 
 
 TOPIC SUGGESTIONS 
 General 
 
 1. Current events, and current discoveries in art, 
 science, and philosophy, offer of course the most pro- 
 lific sources of material for class-room speeches; and 
 the best way to keep in touch with them is through 
 the daily newspapers and the periodicals (See Appen- 
 dix B). Since the interest in current topics is usually 
 more or less temporary they have been excluded from 
 the list of topics noted below. 
 
 2. Campus topics are useful for short speeches, but 
 the student is cautioned against the all-but-universal 
 error of taking campus topics too lightly and neglect- 
 ing preparation. 
 
 3. Discussions in other courses suggest many topics, 
 with the additional advantage that they permit the 
 student to economize labor and do more intensive work 
 by preparing two lessons at once. 
 
 4. The study of public speaking itself offers ma- 
 terial for speeches on the seminar plan. For example, 
 a student may take the subject of "Attention,", and 
 after reading Chapter V. of this book and, let us say, 
 the chapters on "Attention" in James' Principles oj 
 Psychology and Winans' Public Speaking, formulate 
 and express his own opinions on the subject. 
 
 156
 
 APPENDIX C 157 
 
 5. The impulse to answer others, cither to improve 
 upon what they have said or to refute them, not only 
 provides good topics, but tends to arouse the student, 
 make him less self-conscious, and develop his sense of 
 communication. 
 
 Specific 
 
 The following one hundred topics of successful class 
 speeches have been selected with httle regard to bal- 
 ance and proportion, but with an eye to their possible 
 suggestiveness; the student will find them chiefly use- 
 ful as starting-points for further thought. The simple 
 device of taking a topic from the hst and changing 
 the pm'pose or the point of view will sometimes give 
 the student just what he wants; or the equally simple 
 one of keeping the purpose and changing the scope of 
 the subject. It will be noted that the topics are 
 classified according to purpose as purposes are classi- 
 fied in Chapter III. 
 
 1. To inform 
 
 A Bit of Inside Information 
 
 By a student who has figured in an unpublished 
 army scandal. 
 
 The French Battlefields, Four Years After 
 
 By a former soldier just back from a tour of 
 France. 
 
 Some Little Known Facts About the Bible 
 
 By a divinity student who has been making a 
 special study of the history of the Scriptm-es. 
 
 Ectoplasm 
 
 A summary of the evidence regarding this strange 
 phenomenon, by a student interested in spiritual- 
 ism.
 
 158 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 How a Modern Hotel Is Run 
 
 By a student whose father owns one. 
 The Swiss System of Military Training 
 
 The facts about it, by a student of military 
 
 science. 
 The Truth About Our Wars 
 
 By an iconoclast who has been reading records 
 
 and statistics. 
 The Scientific Evidence in Support of a BeUef in 
 Immortality 
 
 An impartial, impersonal summary of the known 
 
 facts. 
 
 2. To enlighten 
 
 What Is Education? 
 
 An explanation of one student's understanding of 
 
 the term. 
 What Is Freedom of Speech? 
 
 By a law student familiar with court decisions in 
 
 the matter. 
 Lawful and Unlawful Radicalism 
 
 An attempt to define the difference, by another 
 
 law student. 
 Aristotle's Theories of Government 
 
 An explanation of a most interesting point of view. 
 The Difference Between Socialism and Bolshevism 
 
 By an ex-Socialist who is also a student of 
 
 Russian affairs. 
 The New Movement in the Art of the Theatre 
 
 An attempt to explain Gordon Craig and some of 
 
 his disciples. 
 Aristotle's Theory of Tragic Poetry 
 
 An analysis of the tragic beauty in Shakespeare's
 
 APPENDIX C 159 
 
 plays in terms of the basic principles laid down by 
 
 the great Athenian. 
 The Theory of Evolution 
 
 What it means and what it does not mean. 
 National Evolution 
 
 An analysis of Bernhardi's doctrine. 
 Atheism and Agnosticism Distinguished 
 
 By an agnostic who declines to be considered an 
 
 atheist. 
 The Religion of the Red Man 
 
 By a student who has lived among the Chippewas. 
 The Final Solution of the Liquor Problem 
 
 Explaining a new and original plan. 
 Democracy in Industry 
 
 Explanation of a plan to end strikes. 
 The German Idea of Education 
 
 By a student who has been to school in four 
 
 countries. 
 Psychoanalysis and Dreams 
 
 By a disciple of Freud. 
 
 3. To convince 
 
 How Germany Won the War 
 
 By a student who tliinks she did. 
 Should the U. S. Adopt a System of Universal Military 
 Trauiing? 
 
 By an admirer of the Swiss System. 
 Are We an Improvement on Our Fathers, Morally? 
 
 By a young man who thinks not. 
 Have the Labor Unions Outgrown Their Usefulness? 
 
 By a former sympathiser whose sympathy has 
 
 been alienated.
 
 160 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Should the Publication of Foreign Language News- 
 papers in the U. S. Be Prohibited? 
 
 By a student from Milwaukee. 
 Should Immigration Be Restricted by a Personnel 
 Test? 
 
 By one who has observed the failure of the "Melt- 
 ing Pot." 
 Should the U. S. Adopt a Responsible Cabinet Form 
 of Government? 
 
 By an admirer of the British sj^stem, in disgust 
 
 at many deadlocks at Washington. 
 Why I Agree with Nietzsche 
 
 By a believer in natural evolution. 
 In Defense of Machiavelli 
 
 By one who has just read "The Prince." 
 College Spirit, Real and Sham 
 
 An effort to prove that true loyalty is not to be 
 
 measured in terms of shouting. 
 Can Our Movie Stars Act? 
 
 By one who speaks feelingly in the negative. 
 Will Incomes Be Equal in Utopia? 
 
 An attempt to refute Bernard Shaw's "Case for 
 
 Equality." 
 Is the Doctrine of Individual Liberty Obsolete? 
 
 By one who deplores the rising tide of pater- 
 nalism. 
 Does History Always Repeat Itself? 
 
 An attempt to prove the old saying a fallacy. 
 The Case Against Democracy 
 
 By one who has been reading Maine's "Popular 
 
 Government." 
 The Evils of Vocational Education 
 
 By one who believes in democracy.
 
 APPENDIX C 161 
 
 Shall We Scrap the Three R's? 
 
 By a school teacher, disgusted with educational 
 
 fads. 
 The Evils of Co-education 
 
 By a student who would prefer college as Father 
 
 used to describe it. 
 Should Examinations Be Abolished? 
 
 An attempt to prove that they are unfair and 
 
 useless. 
 Should Education Be Made Easy? 
 
 By a teacher who thinks the Montessori method 
 
 responsible for widespread debility of mind and 
 
 character. 
 Shall We Abolish the Study of Latin and Greek? 
 
 An argument for the negative by a teacher of 
 
 English. 
 Should Private Schools Be Abolished? 
 
 By a militant enemy of aristocracy. 
 Is Mass Education a Failure? 
 
 By an exponent of intellectual aristocracy. 
 Is Advertising Immoral? 
 
 By an ethical theorist whose pet aversion is waste. 
 Censorship and Public Morals 
 
 By one who thinks there should be more and 
 
 sterner censorship, 
 A Defense of Popular Music 
 
 By one who does not like it, but believes in per- 
 sonal liberty. 
 In Defense of the Happy Ending 
 
 By a student who feels that life itself is sad enough. 
 In Defense of the Realistic Drama 
 
 An attempt to refute the arguments of Gordon 
 
 Craig.
 
 162 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 Peace At Any Price 
 
 By a pacifist who thinks some prices too high to 
 pay. 
 Nationalize the Raikoads 
 
 By one who is disgusted with both labor and 
 capital. 
 
 4. To impress 
 
 Is Europe Dying? 
 
 By one who has been troubled by the signs of a 
 
 decaying civilization 
 The Power of Organized Minorities 
 
 By one who would warn us of a menace. 
 Roosevelt in Retrospect 
 
 An admiring appraisal of his achievements. 
 Was Sherman Right? 
 
 By a student who has been to war. 
 Barbarous Homer 
 
 By a pacifist who finds the Ihad a bath of blood. 
 If Christ Were Here Today 
 
 An appraisal of our civilization in terms of Christ's 
 
 teachings. 
 Patriotism? 
 
 An indictment of the sham variety. 
 Soviet America 
 
 A plausible but disturbing prophecy. 
 The American National Failing 
 
 By a student who thinks it is complacency. 
 The Unhappy Atheist 
 
 By one who has been reading Hardy's "Wessex 
 
 Poems." 
 The Value of a College Theatre 
 
 By an enthusiast who thinks dramatics more edu- 
 cational than courses. ,
 
 APPENDIX C 163 
 
 The Meaning and Value of Poetry 
 
 By one who believes it is the poet who perpetu- 
 ates civilization. 
 
 The Menace of the Movies 
 
 By one who is disturbed by the bad ethics of 
 certain fihns. 
 
 The Next War 
 
 A prophecy, by a student of mihtary history. 
 
 The War of the Classes 
 
 By a student of Economics and Sociology. 
 
 The War of the Races 
 
 By one who prophesies the doom of the white races. 
 
 Henry David Thoreau 
 
 A lay sermon in appreciation of the hermit philos- 
 opher. 
 
 The Two Bacons 
 
 By a student of the sciences who thinks Roger 
 Bacon and Francis Bacon the leading thinkers in 
 the history of science. 
 
 The College Man's Rehgion 
 
 By a Methodist, who has read Lindsay's "The 
 Doughboy's Religion." 
 
 American Business Ethics 
 
 An impressive indictment, by a former real estate 
 salesman. 
 
 The Civilizing Influence of the Phonograph 
 
 By a teacher of music in the public schools. 
 
 English Literature and Ideals in America 
 
 By one who thinks them the fire under the '' Melt- 
 ing Pot." 
 
 What We Owe to the British Navy 
 
 Our national existence since 1870, in the opinion 
 of the speaker.
 
 164 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 5. To excite 
 
 (Omitted, for reasons explained on page 18) 
 
 6. To actuate 
 
 Vote for Smith for Class President 
 
 A campus campaign speech. 
 Send a Kid to the Country 
 
 An appeal for funds to support a student camp 
 
 for poor boys. 
 Support the Team 
 
 A plea for better cheering in a bad season. 
 Write a Letter to Bill Jones 
 
 A plea for cheering letters for a classmate in the 
 
 hospital. 
 Get Acquainted With the Library 
 
 By one who has discovered that "browsing" is 
 
 an important part of college education. 
 Know Your Own Language 
 
 By a teacher of etymology, to a class of teachers. 
 Be Tolerant 
 
 A direct appeal for fair minded consideration of 
 
 the views of others. 
 
 7. To entertain 
 
 My Trip to South America 
 
 An interesting account by a student who has 
 
 worked as a sailor. 
 Glycerine and Nitroglycerine 
 
 Humorous reactions to a photoplay of tears and 
 
 terrors.
 
 APPENDIX C 165 
 
 Putting It All Over Grandma 
 
 An amusing defense of the modern girl, by one. 
 Liquor in Literature 
 
 An amusing but imposing array of examples. 
 Silly Censorship 
 
 By a "movie fan" who has been suffering from it. 
 What Shall We Prohibit Next? 
 
 By a humorist who might be suspected of "wet" 
 
 sentiments. 
 Toddling at Teacher's Apron Strings 
 
 By a student who can laugh at his own lack of 
 
 self-reliance. 
 Utopia Up to Date 
 
 A satire on modern theories and "isms." 
 The Best Photoplay I Ever Saw 
 
 An entertaining discussion of it. 
 Classics that Couldn't Pass the Censor 
 
 By a good-natured soul who is more amused than 
 
 embittered. 
 Some Curious Byways of Readmg 
 
 An entertaining talk on books. 
 Fads and Fancies in Education 
 
 By a teacher who thinks supervisors most amusing. 
 Some New Things Under the Sun 
 
 An interesting mixture of humor and truth. 
 My Impressions of America and the Americans 
 
 By a Chinese student. 
 The Greatest Novel Ever Written 
 
 By a student who has just been reading it. 
 Should Millionaires Be Abolished? 
 
 By a student who is one. 
 The Possibilities of Radio 
 
 A fanciful dream of the future.
 
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