Prison reform.

Tariff and the farmer.

The solid south and the Democratic party.
Air mail and express.

The president and the servile press.

The gasoline supply.

Hard roads.

4. To Convince

There are two sides to each of these assertions of belief:

The country needs a new political alignment.

Our schools are more devoted to play than to work.
We need a censor for the stage.

Youth is enjoying too great freedom.

Christians do not sufficiently support their convictions.
Industry will hurt itself by its attitude toward agricul-
ture.

Main Street needs an awakening in architecture.
Something must be done to conserve wild life.

The law needs reforming.

Einstein is a benefactor to human thought.

Young people today do not really know what drunken-
ness is.

Congress is at the mercy of slavish party regularity.
State universities are handicapped for honesty of thinking.
Foreign oil is not worth the evils bred in getting it.
Newspaper ethics are a myth.

Big-city ideals are a menace to town and farm.

The opponents of the Eighteenth Amendment have yet to suggest a convincing substitute.

College is no longer a place for education.

Jazz is doomed to early extinction.

My home town rates high.

The airplane is destined to revolutionize traffic.

Our climate is changing.

Flag waving in the public schools is futile as a breeder

of sincere patriotism.

Nullification will yet wreck the union.

High-school athletes get their diplomas too easily.

The modern girl needs to slow down.

America needs more homes and fewer clubs.

Our industry is dangerously overexpanded.
Child labor is still a menace.

Electric power monopoly is a national menace.

CHAPTER XVI

DEVELOPING THE OUTLINE

Argument of the Chapter.-Any declarative sentence may serve as an outline topic and can be developed convincingly by an informed and ingenious speaker. Convincingness of ideas arises from three sources; experience, authority, and reasoning. Which of these to use and when, the speaker decides by the attitude which a given outline topic excites in the audience: whether they accept it, suspend decision, or reject it. From these three attitudes of the audience spring three methods of developing outline topics: the impressive, the didactic, and the conciliatory. By using the right method of choosing material to develop topics, the speaker can aim directly at the interests of his audience and carry a maximum of convincingness, both to the various topics of the outline and to the specific proposition from which the speech gets its start and which is its logical and emotional conclusion.

DEVELOPING TOPIC SENTENCES

Assume that you now have your outline in fair shape for going ahead with the speech. You have before you a number of "points," full declarative sentences committing you to definite stands on certain matters, and arranged in an order which you hope promises success. Say that the outline, then, is good enough to go ahead with-though as you read and think you will be likely to find improvements. What does the situation call for next? We find our answer again in human nature, in how topic sentences are accepted by the audience.

Note that almost any kind of declarative sentence can be used for a topic. Much can be said on any of the following, though they differ most widely in weight, tone, and dramatic power:

The view was unsurpassed.

The world is too much with us.

Congress is made up of inferior men.

Taxes that year had been unconscionably high.

To the brave belong the fair.

Bridge is a game that requires the greatest concentration. The farm-relief bill provoked unparalleled deception of the voters.

Seek ye first the kindom of God and all these things will be added unto you.

It had been a wet, unpleasant night.

You have done wrong and you know it.

What you are speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.
This condition was caused by the tariff on wheat.

The result will be an incomparable growth for our industry.
A hot time was had by all.

For such sentiments he should have been banished from decent society.

It takes no great ingenuity to make an interesting threeminute speech on any of these sentence topics. They can be used here as an exercise in amplifying an outline topic into interesting discourse. If you can do this, you are ready for public appearances; for this matter of developing topics is speaking and writing.

But at once it will be noted that no sensible speaker would go about it to develop all these in just the same spirit and manner. Then what is he to do about it? On what basis shall he treat them as differently as they deserve? The answer is found again in the audience and its feelings. So next we come to a consideration of how audiences can be expected to feel toward the speaker's topics, or "points," or arguments, and what is to be done to meet their feelings. Note that the outline maker at this stage of his work is predicting, is deciding beforehand, how his prospective audience will feel about the topic sentences he has decided upon.

Let us try to make a formula for the selection of ideas so as to develop outline topics most advantageously.

I. SOURCES OF CONVINCINGNESS OF IDEAS

We get ideas from three general sources: (1) What we have seen and felt; (2) what other people tell us; and (3) what we reason out. We can call these:

Ideas we have gained by Experience.

Ideas we accept from Authority.
Ideas we make from Reasoning.

1. Ideas from Experience:

Memories from past sense impressions: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and all the other sense impressions. Images of people, things, places, events.

Opinions, judgments, beliefs, convictions.

Stories, description, arguments, explanations.

2. Ideas from Authority:

Statements of experts, those who are presumed to know
more accurately than others.

Data, statistics, reports, summaries, reviews, digests, records.
Quotations from leaders and chosen heroes.

Attitudes of patriotism, religion, art, morals; group loyalty
of any kind; "mental stereotypes."

The assertions of the speaker himself accepted because of his prestige, known honesty, position, or because of his influence as the one holding attention at the time.

3. Ideas from Reasoning:

Definitions.

Generalizations.

Analogies.

Explanation of causes that have brought about results.
Prediction of results to ensue.

Classification.

THE BASIC ATTITUDES TOWARD ACCEPTANCE OF IDEAS

Herein are found the stuffs by which "points" are made up from ideas; these are the bricks from which the speaker builds his house. How then, we may well ask, shall he choose? Hopeless mistakes in choice are fatally easy. Everyone has heard the preacher take a text that all his congregation believe implicitly and has seen him foolishly spend forty minutes arguing it as if he were in the presence of his bitterest opponents. Everyone has heard after-dinner orators assume to tell the audience that the country needs a higher moral tone, and disastrously try to do it with nothing but funny stories. Everyone has heard a speaker talk on the subject, "We are living in wonderful times," and then

drearily stuff his after-dinner audience with dry statistics. Or we have heard him spend so much time telling how glad he is to be present and how lovely everybody and everything is, that he unluckily has had no time left for the thing he started out to say. Choosing the wrong material seems sometimes to be one of the commonest things public speakers do. So how is one to choose with sense and safety?

The answer is found in pointing a topic sentence at the particular audience you have in mind and then figuring out how the idea is going to hit. Before choosing material to support a topic, always answer the following question, How will this assertion, or "point," be received by this audience? Only three answers are possible:

They will accept.

They will suspend acceptance or rejection,

neither accepting nor rejecting.

They will reject.

There is no other position they can take. These can be called by the simple names:

Acceptance
Suspension
Rejection

Acceptance can be in varying degrees of enthusiasm; a tacit and inert agreement because it is too much trouble to question the matter, or a support of the idea to the extent of being ready to die for it. Suspension of judgment can arise from a feeling that the evidence is not complete, from failure to make a decision, from a desire to give both sides a fair hearing, from indifference to the whole matter, or from sheer ignorance. Rejection can be mild when they deem the matter unimportant and uninteresting or it may take on a fervor that savors of blood and battle.

Thus if you would know how to turn topic sentences into discourse, which is the very stuff of speech making, you must decide to your own satisfaction which of these three attitudes is stirred in your audience by each topic sentence in your outline. This is the point at which you make mo