often congeals over a public meeting before anyone has spoken. They are exceedingly useful when they help warm the audience to the speaker and set him up as a man worth listening to. Once speaker and audience get on good human terms of fellowship, the rest is made easier.

5. Use the devices of logic in the most rigid and careful way you can to prevent an opponent from slipping in objections at the joints of your argument; employ conjunctions and connective phrases with the utmost care.

a. Give definitions that you feel are objection proof.

b. Develop generalizations that you feel include all the essential particulars.

c. Draw analogies that have sufficient parallels to be convincing. d. Make arguments from casual relations that connect cause and effect with extreme caution and prudence.

e. Work out classifications that are full and satisfying.

Any argumentative topic will serve, if you assume an audience that is opposed, as:

a. We shall need increased appropriations next year.

b. Our taxing system is thoroughly out of date.

c. A vote for this man is a vote for lawlessness.

d. If we do not change our policy in dealing with new industries, we might as well go out of business as a progressive city. e. If you do not change your habits of life, you are headed for the rocks.

6. Cultivate the art of narration to such a degree that when you tell a story to break the ice of a meeting or to relieve the tension, you will commend yourself to your audience as a person of taste, wit, understanding of human nature, and of tolerant spirit. (Usually this means cultivating the art of doing impersonation in a convincing manner, see p. 16.) A man who can narrate well, not omitting the interpretative and impersonative elements of good story-telling, can get a hearing when other speakers only put audiences to sleep. This may sound harsh, but it is most undeniably true.

CHAPTER XVII

METHODS OF PREPARING A SPEECH

Argument of the Chapter.-Different circumstances call for different kinds of preparation for speaking, and these different kinds of preparation provide, in turn, different kinds of speaking. They can be summed as four: (1) Impromptu, (2) Extempore, (3) Memorized, (4) Read from Manuscript. The written speech calls for special methods of composition.

(1) IMPROMPTU SPEAKING

There is the speech that comes, seemingly, without deliberate preparation. It can be divided into two branches: (a) the speech that has in reality been hidden in the "back of the mind" of the speaker and is, after all, a well-digested and discriminating effort, and (b) the prattlings of a man who merely talks right on even though he has nothing to say and says it voluminously and recklessly. This latter is common enough and is never well received. It can always be detected for what it is, and is so far from effective communication that audiences are rarely influenced by it, except to ennui or disgust. Nimble-witted people like to try it, but such have little to do in moving or enlightening men.

Impromptu Speaking for Experts Only.-Yet there is a true place for real impromptu speaking. For the mind is so constituted that it can carry, without one's being articulately aware of its existence, a logically arranged and properly organized train of thought. A mind well stocked with information and impressions can always profit by any sudden emergency that compels it to take stock of its possessions. Hastily demanded inventories of this kind often give us some of our brightest ideas and our most securely reasoned conclusions. Call a man to his feet to discourse on something about which he has thought long and hard, or to sum up

impressions from experiences that have been numerous and intense, and he will frequently produce a better composition than he would grind out in the seclusion and security of his study. There is a fine crystallizing influence wielded by an audience upon men of wide reading, experience, and feeling, when speaking out of their actual experience, provided they are accustomed to audiences and can do their thinking freed from the embarrassments of stage fright and inexperience in speaking.

In this sense it is that impromptu speaking has a place. Any expert can stand on his feet and tell interesting and impressive things about his field if his body and voice will let his words out. A mining engineer ought to be able to say interesting things on mining engineering any time and under any circumstances. A traveler can tell of his travels, a scholar of his researches, an athlete of his contests, a housewife of her trials and victories. If such an expert is skilled as a speaker he can even be coherent and unified, and can give a nice emphasis, both to his whole composition and to his individual sentences. If he has never made a speech, however, and is frightened on his feet before a crowd, he will be but little more effective, if any, than any other man who may have got his knowledge from the newspapers. But every man of trained mind-teacher, lawyer, preacher, engineer, specialist ought to be able to say many things impromptu and say them well-always providing he has the wit to keep to his field of surest knowledge. In fine, whatever is thoroughly familiar to a man skilled in speaking and inured to facing audiences, with body and voice opening the way for words and meaning, can be the subject of impromptu speeches of genuine worth and effectiveness.

(2) EXTEMPORE SPEAKING

The ideal type of speaking is the extempore. It implies entire adequacy of preparation coupled with that freedom of choice of words that is vital to the best communicative rapport, to the give and take that lies behind all speaking and conversing. The impromptu speaker to succeed must be an expert, expert in his subject matter and expert in arranging

it and giving it the right kind of vocal utterance. The extempore speaker can make plans against any possible contingency, and so keep a fine adjustment between thinking and voice; whereas the impromptu speaker is always in danger of being too busy with his meaning to have any energy left for vocal accuracy. This is the reason the impromptu speaker must be an expert; otherwise he fails either to do active, concentrated, and orderly thinking or else he falls back to poor vocal habits in his abstraction with his theme. Only the best of automatic habits, both in his thinking and in his vocal manipulations, can be trusted upon the impromptu occasion.

The Extempore Manner Demands Full Preparation.-The extempore, however, has come to imply that style of speaking which, while adequately prepared, yet leaves the speaker free to make any change necessary by the occasion. Your true extempore speaker has his purpose clearly in mind, knows just what it is he demands of his audience, can state his case in one proposition, and has prepared a careful outline to fit the needs of his purpose and his audience. Some of his sentences he even has framed in precise, accurate, compact form. But at all times he is ready to look his audience in the eye, catch the full power of communicative rapport, and make whatever additions, subtractions, or emendations his good sense, from what he sees and hears of his audience, tells him must be made. Thus he is able to adhere to the two vital needs of effective speaking—adequate preparation and the spirit of true communication.

All Can Become Experts.-From this it can readily be seen that true extempore speaking can be had by any person of intelligence and will power. Impromptu is for the expert only who happens to find himself in a fortunate emergency; extempore is for any person who knows how to prepare and has the will power to carry through his desires. But any person can make himself the expert by adequate study:first know your purpose, phrase it accurately into a wellworded proposition, then amplify it into a proper outline, and be ready to clothe it with well-chosen and well-worded sentences. The subject may be one the speaker has never

seen before; but reading, meditation, writing, and speaking will all combine to make him expert enough in that particular subject so that he can reproduce the effect of any other expert giving a true and interesting impromptu. Thus prepared, a man can do his vital thinking while he speaks and his vital speaking while he thinks. This is the ideal always to be sought for.

The Best Speakers Are True Extemporizers.-Be it known that all the best speakers in the history of oratory have been true extemporizers; men who have so thoroughly mastered their subjects that they have known precisely what they were going to say, yet who were ready to react to whatever messages the audience sent to them as they faced one another; men who were skilled enough in speaking so that their voices behaved well automatically, without the necessity of making voice behavior the matter of primary attention. Also let it be known that the speeches we read in the histories and textbooks are hardly ever the precise speeches delivered; orators always reserve the right to "amend the records." They prepare their speeches minutely and with great care, often writing them out word for word, till on their chosen subject they become experts; then they rehearse one way and another with an imaginary audience; finally they face their audience and, studying the moods and tenses they see revealed before them, they keep as much of the speech as they find profitable and change to whatever they find necessary. The next day the speech appears in the papers, and what appears is either the original written form, from which the speaker may have departed very widely in the presence of his audience, or else it is a revision of the written form to make it conform with what the speaker actually said or with what he would say if he had to do it over again. Probably the latter is what really appears most of the time. In any event, though, what appears looks like a speech that must have been written with care and may have been conned word for word, but still was rendered in the true extempore man、 ner, and so had all that is best in speaking-a mind prepared for what it is to say responding to the communicative urge, choosing words that best carry the meaning, using a