times in many combinations. Before long you will see that some one idea is comprehensive of another four or six or dozen, that it begins to look like a topic comprehending this group. Eventually you will find that you have singled out the cards that contain topic ideas, thoughts worth using as topic sentences for your outline. And close to these you will have placed cards containing ideas that support this topic. By checking and rechecking you will ultimately arrive at the point where you feel that you have found your major "points" and the stuff with which you are to back them up, and will have got these into an order and sequence that represents your best thought as to how to begin, continue, and finish your line of thought. 6. Throw away what you do not want; sometimes the hardest task of all. 7. You are ready now to make your outline. See pp. 333 ff. above. 8. When you feel sure of your outline, stack your cards so that the first is on top and the rest in order, with the last at the bottom. You are now ready to compose. Let us assume that you are beginning to write. You have your paragraph outline carefully worked out by now. Have a copy of it in plain sight. Set the pack to one side of your desk pad; for right-handed people a little to the left. Expose four or five cards at a time, laying out the first, second, third, fourth, say, in that order, the first nearest you and the fifth exposed on top of the pack. Keep an eye on all the exposed cards to get the feeling for unity and coherence; see what is coming as you write. You can thus be much more logical and emotionally harmonious. As you write from the first card, turn it over, move the others down nearer you, and expose the sixth card. As fast as you have finished with each card, set it aside upside down on those already turned over; then keep the procession moving by turning the next card to sight, thus keeping an eye on what is to follow. Do not forget to keep an eye on your outline. Use judgment as to paragraphing; in this the sight of the coming ideas will help. With four or five ideas in sight at a time you will be guided as to how much to expand or to compress. Each card ordinarily will offer but a hint or a suggestion, and you will have to decide as you work how long or how short to make the discourse that it suggests. Do this in the light of the topic in hand and of what is in sight to come. Paragraphs of from 150 to 250 words go best in public speeches. This procedure will give you a rough draft of what you want to say. And it will be rough enough, never fear. But you will have the joy of getting it down in the order in which you have planned it, with unity, with coherence, with some degree of emphasis, and with some measure of proportion. And this is very great gain indeed; for you are thus spared from rambling, meandering aimlessly, going off on unplanned excursions that waste your time, merely trusting to Providence for ideas and direction, and losing the thread of your discourse. But you will probably not yet have what you would like to call a good speech. It will lack strong sentence structure, the right word in the right place, emphasis on the beginning or end of the sentence, apt figures, balance, antithesis, compact utterance. Though your cards should have furnished you with many an idea already neatly turned and rounded out, still there will be much polishing to do. Go over it and make it a good piece of rhetoric. To this process there is literally no end. For contest speeches this is one of the most exacting of tasks, while for speeches that are to be somewhat extempore when delivered this will be not so important. This is to say, if you are writing chiefly to organize and fix your thought, you can well afford to rest content with fixing the drift of your speech, leaving the wording and sentence structure for the inspiration that every skilled speaker gets from his audience. But in all cases, whether speaking from notes or speaking word for word, such a process as this gives you the maximum assurance of strict unity, tight coherence, and vigorous emphasis. You can start on the right track, keep on it, avoid needless stoppage and blockade, and take every grade at your safest speed. It is good thinking made usable in actual practice. CHAPTER XVIII INTERPRETATIVE SPEECH Argument of the Chapter.-Interpreting the printed page is a process of translating inner speech into spoken sense and feeling. The first task is to find the meaning in all its richness and fullness, and then to carry this meaning with equal fullness and richness. To do these things successfully there must be a recognition of logical meanings and meanings of an emotional nature. The steps toward an understanding of both kinds of meaning are: studying the perspective, mastering the details, and placing the emphasis. INNER SPEECH Thinking for public address is a matter of putting ideas, purposes, and feelings into words; thinking for reading and interpretation-including impersonation and acting is a matter of turning words into feelings, purposes, and ideas. The two do not work the same way at all, though the effects -good sense and interesting sentiments-sound alike. How, then, are words on the page turned into good speech? The workings of the process are these: The printed symbols cause us to say words to ourselves; what is called "inner speech." Our eyes read the letters and we say the words. Notice what happens to you when you encounter the symbols EXIT, or DETOUR, or STOP; the marks compel you to do something in your lips, tongue, and throat that is as near to saying the word as you can come without pronouncing it. Many people actually utter these words aloud. So with all reading; either the symbols cause you to say the words of the page openly, or else you say them silently to yourself. This mere saying of the words, openly or silently, exposes you to the sense the author of them intended. Chiefly you get the plain. logical sense first; the relation of subject and predicate. noun and adjective, verb and adverb, and the other grammatical-logical-relationships. Note the word "exposes"; it is entirely possible to utter or mutter all the words and get no sense of any kind. But most of the time something in us -past training, habit, curiosity-leads us to make sentences and sense out of "words" that command the eye. But remember that no word ever existed on a printed page, and no sentence. Words and sentences are only found in a human being; a human being stirred to action either by symbols from outside or by ideas from within. The page "word," which is a symbol only, touches off actions of the speech apparatus, and this action touches off images, ideas, fancies, memories, imagination, inferences, purposes― thought. What was called Common Reading in Chapter II is the kind of reading from the page most common in the grade schools; chiefly devoted to getting all the words in, pronounced more or less correctly, and in the right order. A surprising number of college students cannot do even these three things in reading. What is to be said of their way of bringing out the most delicate meanings, the sentence sense and the feeling tone? INTERPRETATION This is equivalent to asking, What of their ability to Interpret? The answer need not be expressed. But the question raises another and very pertinent, What is Interpretation? What is its essential nature? What makes it a special problem? Strictly, all interpretation is a matter of one man's notion. of what the printed page symbols mean. He says in effect, "This is what they mean to me"; then he reads them to us for our approval or whatever we have. We get the idea from such notions as "interpreting" a glance, a gesture, a facial expression, a tone of voice, a statesman's public utterances, a bank's refusal to grant credit, an invitation we did. not expect. We say "What does it mean? What am I to understand by it?" So with the marks on the page, the socalled words, "What am I to understand by them," and "how am I to make others understand them as I do?" The answer to these questions gives the key to successful reading and interpretation. I. FINDING THE MEANING The interpreter finds the meaning by the following steps: A. Study of Perspective 1. The Author 1. Logical Details a. Paraphrasing b. Words and Phrases c. Allusions 2. Emotional Details a. Tone Copying C. Emphasis 1. For Logical Meaning a. Nouns and Verbs b. Adjectives and Adverbs c. Balanced Emphasis d. The New versus the Old e. Climax f. Insinuation, Implication, Contrast 2. For Emotional Meaning A. STUDY OF PERSPECTIVE 1. THE AUTHOR.-It is a commonplace that the more one knows about a given composition the better one can read it. Before any valid attempt to interpret, there must come an understanding of the meaning. It is the old doctrine that impression comes before expression, and very valid. And there are many ways of adding to the impression. Whatever serves to enrich the content of one's thought adds to one's foundation for expression, though of itself it is not enough to insure effective reading. First, many minds, especially of the inquisitive sort the better sort are helped toward expressiveness by a thorough knowledge of the author or of a story or a poem. By thus acquiring a familiarity with him or his works they are made |