Some Hints On Public Speaking

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS TO THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, APRIL, 1910.

EIGHTY years ago Thomas Carlyle preached the gospel of Silence and denounced the growing tendency to talk in public. Since then the habit has increased, is increasing, and seems most unlikely to decrease. It may be true that everything worth saying has been said. Nevertheless, orations will go on as long as men are willing to listen.

You whom I see here present will join—some of you have already joined — the great army of orators, so it is natural that you should desire to have a few hints given you on the subject, even if they claim no other authority than that which fifty years of observation here and in Europe may seem to confer. They shall be put in the form of a few short maxims of a severely practical character. Most, perhaps all, of these maxims will appear obvious, but I give them not be-cause they are novel, but because they are so constantly neglected as to be worth repeating.

1. Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to, especially in a deliberative assembly or wherever there is business to be done, while the man of mere words carries no sort of weight. Try to have an idea, or if you cannot find one — ideas are none too common — have two or three relevant facts. You may tell me that sometimes a man is forced to speak when there is nothing to be said. This does not often happen, because if you think a little be-fore you rise, you will almost always find something bearing on the matter in hand, even if the occasion be a purely ornamental one. There is a well-known speech of Cicero's in which he had to present a legal case on behalf of a poet. He evidently knew that the legal case was weak, so he passed quickly and lightly over it, but made a graceful and eloquent discourse upon poetry in general. The theme was not very novel then, and is still less novel now, but the discourse was so finished in its language that it can still be read with pleasure. So when you have to propose the health of some one of whose personal merits you know nothing, you may say something about the importance of his office if he is a state governor or a mayor, or the services rendered by his profession if he is a surgeon, or if he is a newspaper reporter, Milton's Areopagitica with its stately argument on behalf of the liberty of unlicensed printing may suggest something appropriate. If you can find nothing at all to say, don't say it. Your silence will not harm you in the long run.

Lord Brougham, who was a power in his day, though his eloquence does not suit our modern taste, advised young speakers to begin by acquiring fluency as the one indispensable thing, and William Pitt the younger is said to have acquired his marvellous command of words by having been trained by his father to trans-late rapidly at sight from Latin authors. Nevertheless there is such a thing as a fatal fluency. Whoever follows Brougham's advice ought to beware the habit of thinking more of the words than of the sense.

2. Always know what you mean to say. If possible, consider beforehand what you are going to say, and make your own mind perfectly clear what is the argument which you want to put, or the facts you want to convey. If your own mind is muddled, much more muddled will your hearers be. Bring your thoughts to a point, reject whatever is irrelevant, and be content if you have one good point and can drive it home. It is pitiable to see how often a man who really has some knowledge of his subject goes groping or stumbling about, trying to get somewhere, but not getting any-where, not for want of words, but because he cannot put his ideas into the form of definite propositions. In trying to discover what it is that you mean, you may discover that you mean nothing. If so, the sooner you know it the better. Sometimes one hears a speech in the course of which the speaker gets his own mind clear, and comes at last to know what he means, but when it is too late to get hold of the audience. If he had thought the thing out beforehand, all would have gone well.

3. Always arrange your remarks in some sort of order.

No matter how short they are to be, they will be the better for having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nothing pleases an audience more than the sense that they are being led along a path towards a definite goal by a man who knows his way. It gives them confidence that the speaker understands what he is about and will bring them out all right somewhere. Do not, however, let your arrangement be so obtrusively elaborate as to alarm them. It used to be the fashion of Scottish preachers to divide their subject into three or four "heads" with a "firstly," a "secondly," a "thirdly," and so forth, under each head, so that the listener knew what a long road he had to travel. I, remember one sermon in which a venerable minister got as far as nineteenthly under the second head. The process of classifying facts and arguments and placing them in their right order in one's own mind helps to clarify it, while it adds strength to the argument. It might almost be said that a well-arranged speech is seldom a bad speech, because in the process of arrangement a man of any sense is sure to find out the deficiencies in his facts or the weak points in his arguments in time to cure them.

4. At all hazards, Be Clear. Make your meaning, whatever it is, plain to your audience. Though obscure speech is usually due to obscure thought, this is not always so. Some persons who think clearly have not learned to express themselves clearly, because they are nervous in public, or have an insufficient command of words. In such cases it may be better to resort to the expedient, otherwise to be deprecated, of reading a speech from manuscript rather than confuse the audience. You have, moreover, to think not of the form thoughts take in your own mind, but of the form in which they will be comprehensible by your audience. Do not imitate the bishop who, preaching in a village church, told Hampshire rustics that "Nature herself shall be the palimpsest on which Omnipotence shall inscribe the characters of a rejuvenated humanity." Let the construction of your sentences be simple enough for the hearers to follow, and the words such as they cannot fail to understand. To find themselves puzzled over your meaning, and while they are still puzzling over your last sentence, to be unable to attend to the next one, annoys your hearers and lessens the chance of pleasing or persuading them. Though obscurity of expression is mostly due to obscurity of thought, it sometimes happens that people whose thought is clear enough insist on wrapping it up in vague and cloudy rhetoric. To the rule that lucidity is the first of merits, there is one exception, viz., where a speaker feels himself driven to the shelter of obscurity. I have seen astute debaters, compelled by their position to speak, unwilling to be untruthful, yet forbidden by considerations of prudence to speak out frankly all they thought, deliberately involve themselves in a web of words where each sentence seemed to have a meaning, but the hearers were left to wonder what the whole speech meant.

But such contingencies are rare ; you may go through life without getting caught in one.

5. In controversial speaking, as, for example, in conducting a lawsuit or arguing a proposal in a deliberative body, think always of what your opponent will say, and so frame your speech as to anticipate his answers and give little opening for his criticism. The grounds of this rule are too obvious to need illustration. Add to it the old maxim that in replying you ought to meet and counter your adversary's jest by earnest, and his earnest by jest. Aristotle said it, but mother wit has taught it to many a man who never heard of Aristotle.

6. Always reflect beforehand upon the kind of audience you are likely to have, for even in the same country or in the same section of the country audiences are by no means the same, and what suits one may not suit another. I have known practised speakers throw overboard the speech they had intended to deliver and substitute something different when they looked from the platform over the faces beneath. If your hearers are mostly educated men and women, you may assume much as already known which it would be proper to explain to persons of scantier knowledge. But it is safer to proceed on the assumption of ignorance (so long as you do not let the audience think you are talking down to them) than to assume knowledge. We are all of us more ignorant than other people know, or indeed than we know ourselves. If the audience are disposed to be hostile, you will begin by putting them in good humour and trying to excite their curiosity as to the line you will take. If they are already wearied by the harangues of your predecessors, you will go at them with quick, sharp, bright, bold sentences, and will let them feel that you do not mean to detain them long. And you will watch them as you go along just as you would watch your fly on the surface of the water you are fishing.

7. Never despise those whom you address, whatever you may think of their intellectual attainments. Give them the best you have to give. You need not talk over their heads, as I once heard an eminent English historian, when he was candidate for a seat in Parliament, discourse to agricultural labourers upon the Landesgemeinde of the Forest Cantons of Switzerland. But you will find it politic as well as polite to respect them, and you must never think that your best thoughts, expressed in the fittest words, are too good for them. Though noisy and empty rhetoric will often draw cheers, still the masses of the common people almost always appreciate solid and relevant facts, sound and useful thoughts, stated in language they can understand, and there will probably be among them those who would perceive and resent any indication that you were talking down to their inferior capacity.

8. Be sparing of literary ornament, except in speeches that are of a frankly decorative kind, such as those made after dinner, or panegyrics of some notable person whom it is wished to honour. Just as an ornament should seem when used in architecture, to be an original and essential part of the whole design, so in oratory the decorative parts should be connected with, and naturally grow out of, the substance of the matter in hand, and should help to make the speech more vivid and telling, rather than seem stuck on in order to please the ear without strengthening the sense. Abraham Lincoln rendered a great service to American eloquence when he renounced the florid or tawdry style that prevailed in his day, and set an example of speaking that was plain, direct, and terse. Be sparing with superlatives; reserve them for occasions where they will really tell. Take pains to choose the strong and simple words, and the words that exactly fit the case. Even an audience that is not itself very cultivated feels the charm of choice and pointed diction, and of words that have some touch of colour in them, such as apt metaphors. A well chosen metaphor often clinches an argument, or becomes an illustration of it in miniature.

9. As respects humorous anecdotes, and jokes in general, these are eminently matters of individual taste, in which each man will please himself, and few general counsels can be given. Though we all envy the speaker who has plenty of merry jests, he needs to be-ware of abusing his gift. There is a tendency today to make after-dinner speaking a mere string of anecdotes, most of which may have little to do with the subject or with one another. Even the best stories lose their charm when they are dragged in by the head and shoulders, having no connection with the allotted theme. Relevance as well as brevity is the soul of wit, for a good speech is a work of art, in which every part should have an organic relation to every other part. And when you tell a story, take some pains with the form of it. The late Mr. James Russell Lowell, whom we in England admired as the best after-dinner speaker of his day, was a master in that line. The classical felicity of his diction set off and gave a charm to the smallest anecdote he told.

10. Never, if you can help it, be dull. It is a fault to have too many flowers or too many fireworks, but it is a worse fault to be tedious. An eminent Oxford teacher of my undergraduate days, who is now a learned and distinguished English writer, coined for his pupils a phrase which had a great vogue in the university: "It is better to be flippant than to be dull." This audacious advice, meant for young writers, is even more applicable to young speakers, because, bad as dulness is in print, it is still worse when you cannot escape from it without quitting the dinner table. Many are the causes of dreariness in a speech. One is lack of good matter, for it often happens that the less a man has to say, the more he spins it out. A still commoner one is confused thinking, which makes the speaker lose himself in vague and pointless phrases. Another is monotony in language, the frequent repetition of the same words, because the speaker's vocabulary is scanty and he can command no others. You may ask how dulness can be avoided when the subject is not a lively one. Well, some subjects are dry. The treasurer of a city, or even of a baseball club, who is presenting his accounts, cannot make them fascinating. But dryness is not the same thing as dulness. The least promising subject may be treated with a conciseness and precision and lucidity which allow one the pleasure that good workmanship gives. A speech with those merits will not be dull. Though it may be dry, it will stand out sharp and clear, like a bare mountain peak in the desert of Arizona, and even to the driest topics you can impart a little variety by a lively simile or an apt illustration. Dulness is often the result merely of monotony in voice and manner : and this brings me to another maxim.

11. Remember the importance of Delivery. Demosthenes, greatest of all orators, is reported to have said when asked what was the chief quality in oratory, Delivery; and when asked what was the second and again what was the third, to have made the same reply. It is related that his own elocution and manner were at first poor, and were improved by incessant study and practice. And though a rich or sweet or sonorous and resonant voice is a gift of nature, care and training can do much to get good results out of a mediocre organ. Articulation, modulation, and expression may all be cultivated. To listen to words clearly and finely spoken, and to sentences in which the voice adapts itself to the subject, adds greatly to whatever pleasure a speech can give. However, the four suggestions I make to you are applicable to all, be their voices good or bad. First, Be sure you are heard. Better be silent than be in-audible. Secondly, Do not shout. It is not necessary. Take the measure of the room, look at the man in the last row, throw your voice out so as to reach him, watching his face to see if the words get there, and trust not so much to loudness as to clearness of enunciation and a measured delivery. Thirdly, Beware of exhausting your voice. Do not strain it, however large the room, to its utmost power, at least until near the end of your speech. Fourthly, Vary now and then the key or pitch of your voice. It relieves the listener, and to suddenly raise or lower the voice when there is any change in the topic often helps the sense of the words. A speech seems twice as long when it is delivered in a monotone, and most speeches are too long already.

Were I addressing an English audience I should add a fifth suggestion. Speak slowly. But the fault of going too fast is far less common here than in Britain; in-deed, some of your speakers tend to the opposite error of going too slow. Dr. Phillips Brooks is the only great American to whom I have ever listened who spoke very rapidly. It may interest you to know that John Bright, who was on the whole the greatest English orator of the last half century, told me that when he first began to speak in public his utterance was so rapid that on one occasion a newspaper reported an address he had made at a political meeting in the following words: "The next speech was made by our young townsman, Mr. John Bright, but he spoke so fast that our reporter was quite unable to follow him." When and after Bright had reached his prime, the measured deliberation with which he delivered his sentences made them tell like the blows of a hammer.

12. Never read from manuscript if you can help it, unless when the occasion is one of such exceptional solemnity or dignity that a long and highly finished piece of composition is expected. As for notes, the fewer the better, but if you find that you cannot trust your memory to supply the order of the topics and the particular points you wish to make, or illustrations you wish to intersperse, it is better to refer to your notes for these than to miss the points altogether. There are speakers whose habit it is to carry notes in their pocket even when they hope not to use them. It gives confidence, and saves them from such a fiasco as I have seen befall even practised debaters in the House of Commons, when, having suddenly lost the thread of their discourse, they were obliged to sink sadly to their seats, amid the crushing commiseration of their opponents.

13. Whether you use notes or not, always have ready two or three sentences with which to sit down. You need not be either flowery or sublime in your closing words, but some sort of a peroration you ought to have at command, so as not to bungle and hesitate when the time for ending comes. How often do we see an unhappy fellow-creature go maundering or floundering helplessly along, amid the growing contempt of the audience, having already said all he had got to say, and yet unable to stop because he feels that a closing sentence is needed and he cannot find one.

14. Lastly — and this is a maxim which is of universal application, Never weary your audience. If they are tired before you rise to speak, cut your speech short, unless you feel able to freshen them up and dispel their weariness. Just as physicians say that a man ought to leave off eating while he is still hungry enough to go on eating, so let your hearers wish for more food from you, rather than feel they have had too much already. Consider the hour of the evening and human weakness. One of the most successful speeches I remember to have heard of was made by a famous engineer at a great public dinner of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He came last ; and midnight had arrived. His toast was Applied Science, and his speech was as follows: "Ladies and Gentlemen, at this late hour I advise you to illustrate the Applications of Science by applying a lucifer match to the wick of your bedroom candle. Let us all go to bed."

It might be rash to say that a short speech is never a bad speech, for I have known a man grieve his friends and ruin his case in five minutes. But for ten speeches that are too short there are a hundred that are too long.

A lecture ought not to exceed fifty minutes, a sermon twenty-five minutes, an after-dinner speech (unless of course it is meant to be the chief address of the evening) fifteen minutes. For speeches in law-courts or legislatures, where a mass of facts may have to be ex-pounded and commented on, limits cannot be fixed, but all speeches, everywhere, gain by compression. Mr. Bright, like Chatham and most of our great orators, seldom spoke for more than an hour. Mr. Gladstone, like Edmund Burke, did not so restrict him-self, and both these illustrious men suffered from their copiousness so far as the audience of the moment was concerned, though no one could wish Burke's magnificent orations, as we now have them in print, to be shorter by a sentence. Like Daniel Webster's, they are good all through.

The maxim not to tire or bore your audience is part of a wider precept; viz., to remember the main purpose of a speech. Most speakers are beset, especially in their earlier days, by a temptation from which even those of longer experience are not exempt, the temptation to regard a speech as the opportunity for displaying talent rather than as a means to an end.

The aims or ends of speaking are commonly classed as two. One is to Persuade. The other is to Delight. In order to persuade a court or a jury you must think not of showing off your theoretical gifts, but of getting the judgment or the verdict. The best speech is the speech that convinces court or jury. In a legislative body, the best speech is that which draws votes, or, if that be impossible, which puts heart into your own party. When the speech is meant not to persuade, but to give delight, there are three quarters in which pleasure may be felt; the person in whose honour the speech is made, the audience, and yourself. It is a common error to think too much of the last and too little of the second. So long as you are mindful to say nothing unworthy of yourself, nothing untrue, nothing vulgar, you had better forget yourself altogether and think only of the audience, how to get them and how to hold them. Keep your mind fixed upon your hearers and upon the end in view, whether it be to please or to convince. Appreciation will come if it is deserved, and will come all the more if you do not too obviously play for it.

You will sometimes make failures, for nobody is always at his best. Do not be discouraged. The fault may not be your own, for much depends on conditions you cannot command. But when you feel you have fallen below the best that you can do, ask your-self why, and if the fault is in yourself, try to correct it next time.