PREFACE TO 1920 EDITION THE excuse for a new text on this old subject is the growing democratization of instruction in speech. The academic worth of the subject is now unquestioned, with the result that new courses in speech training are multiplying, from primary grade to university graduate school. This is as it should be; for in a democratic country too much attention cannot be paid to instruction in speech. No democracy could possibly exist without a maximum of effectiveness in public and private discussion among its citizens. To meet this democratic need for educating the masses in effective speech methods, a new text finds justification in proportion as it emphasizes the need for carrying speech instruction to all kinds and conditions of men. This book, then, is offered as a statement of fundamentals that lead into any of the paths the subject may take: conversation, common reading, interpretation, impersonation, public speaking, dramatics, and the speaking we call oratory. Democratization of speech training is its prime object. To accomplish this object it aims to incorporate whatever methods have heretofore found favor by virtue of the good results they have produced. With this end in view it aims to offer speech training for the whole man: body, voice, and mental mechanism. It is frankly psychological in foundation, and of psychologies is outspokenly behavioristic-that is to say, it insists that speech is a matter of the whole man, the coöperative activity of the entire organism; that it is a revelation of personality, but that the true definition of personality gives a picture compounded of thinking apparatus, emotional machinery, muscular activity, and body-wide participating parts-voice, brain, muscles, trunk, and limbs. Its essential thesis is that no speaking is good speaking which is not of the whole machine and which does not establish the desired relationship between the one speaking and the one listening. Hence, attention to training prize pupils is subordinated to care for all, even for redeeming the dull and the slow. Aimed at democratic ends, it holds in the focus of attention the ordinary student, however uninteresting or defective. It assumes that a teacher errs who gauges his work solely by his prize exhibits, his best pupils, his contest performers. Rather, it insists that the true gauge of a teacher's success is the showing he can make in improvement for the lower half, what he can accomplish for the jumblers, the mutterers, the inhibited, the fearful, the blatant, the windy-the vocally halt and lame. There should be little to interest the critic of a teacher's success when asked to pass judgment on only the best students in that teacher's classes. If you would know how great a success a teacher is, call for a parade of the weak and the afflicted; the teacher who can lead these unfortunate ones somewhere near to mediocrity is probably the one most genuinely successful. Anyone by using a mere process of urging can usually get the bright pupils to do well, and almost anyone, with even the slenderest of pedagogical methods, can keep from doing these fast-moving ones injury. But to keep from altogether wrecking the drifting ones, and then, better than this, to lift them out of the heavy seas that threaten to founder them, calls for a skilled pedagogic pilot and a comprehensive pedagogic method. It is in the hope of making it easier for the teacher to furnish helpful training for bright and dull student alike that this text is offered. It aims to provide a wide range of teaching methods; enough for all kinds of classes and for every member of each class. It aims, above all, to meet the problem of the large mixed class. Acknowledgments are clearly due to the host of writers who have helped clarify the issues involved in this study. Special mention can in fairness be made to such original contributors as Rush, Curry, Cumnock, Fulton and Trueblood, Clark and Chamberlain, Phillips, and Winans. These have each contributed something new to the problems of speech training which cannot be left out of a textbook that aims to be comprehensive of the whole field. Special acknowledgments are due to Prof. James M. O'Neill of the University of Wisconsin for reading the manuscript minutely and offering full and invaluable criticism. To my colleague, Lew R. Sarett, I owe a very special acknowledgment for criticisms and helpful advice during five years of intimate and constant coöperation in our jointly shared course, called Oral Expression, at Illinois. Many of the ideas here presented must be credited to his thought, inventiveness, and wide experience on the platform; many more are joint products, the fruit of scores of discussions concerning the problem of a first course in speech training for college students. This book is, in fact, the fourth writing under the same title; three previous editions have been printed locally for the use of Course One in Public Speaking at the University of Illinois, the third being in use at this time also at Knox College. The first writing was printed in 1915, the second in 1916, and the third in 1919. URBANA, ILLINOIS, February, 1920. |