The Art of Public Speaking Part 31

--SHAKESPEARE, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.

Finally, in preparing expository material ask yourself these questions regarding your subject:

What is it, and what is it not?

What is it like, and unlike?

What are its causes, and effects?

How shall it be divided?

With what subjects is it correlated?

What experiences does it recall?

What examples ill.u.s.trate it?

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What would be the effect of adhering to any one of the forms of discourse in a public address?

2. Have you ever heard such an address?

3. Invent a series of examples ill.u.s.trative of the distinctions made on pages 232 and 233.

4. Make a list of ten subjects that might be treated largely, if not entirely, by exposition.

5. Name the six standards by which expository writing should be tried.

6. Define any one of the following: (_a_) storage battery; (_b_) "a free hand;" (_c_) sail boat; (_d_) "The Big Stick;" (_e_) nonsense; (_f_) "a good sport;" (_g_) short-story; (_h_) novel; (_i_) newspaper; (_j_) politician; (_k_) jealousy; (_l_) truth; (_m_) matinee girl; (_n_) college honor system; (_o_) modish; (_p_) slum; (_q_) settlement work; (_r_) forensic.

7. Amplify the definition by ant.i.thesis.

8. Invent two examples to ill.u.s.trate the definition (question 6).

9. Invent two a.n.a.logies for the same subject (question 6).

10. Make a short speech based on one of the following: (_a_) wages and salary; (_b_) master and man; (_c_) war and peace; (_d_) home and the boarding house; (_e_) struggle and victory; (_f_) ignorance and ambition.

11. Make a ten-minute speech on any of the topics named in question 6, using all the methods of exposition already named.

12. Explain what is meant by discarding topics collateral and subordinate to a subject.

13. Rewrite the jury-speech on page 224.

14. Define correlation.

15. Write an example of "cla.s.sification," on any political, social, economic, or moral issue of the day.

16. Make a brief a.n.a.lytical statement of Henry W. Grady's "The Race Problem," page 36.

17. By what a.n.a.lytical principle did you proceed? (See page 225.)

18. Write a short, carefully generalized speech from a large amount of data on one of the following subjects: (_a_) The servant girl problem; (_b_) cats; (_c_) the baseball craze; (_d_) reform administrations; (_e_) sewing societies; (_f_) coeducation; (_g_) the traveling salesman.

19. Observe this pa.s.sage from Newton's "Effective Speaking:"

"That man is a cynic. He sees goodness nowhere. He sneers at virtue, sneers at love; to him the maiden plighting her troth is an artful schemer, and he sees even in the mother's kiss nothing but an empty conventionality."

Write, commit and deliver two similar pa.s.sages based on your choice from this list: (_a_) "the egotist;" (_b_) "the sensualist;" (_c_) "the hypocrite;" (_d_) "the timid man;" (_e_) "the joker;" (_f_) "the flirt;"

(_g_) "the ungrateful woman;" (_h_) "the mournful man." In both cases use the principle of "Reference to Experience."

20. Write a pa.s.sage on any of the foregoing characters in imitation of the style of Shakespeare's characterization of Sir John Falstaff, page 227.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Argumentation will be outlined fully in subsequent chapter.]

[Footnote 13: _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F. Genung.]

[Footnote 14: _How to Attract and Hold an Audience_, J. Berg Esenwein.]

[Footnote 15: On the various types of definition see any college manual of Rhetoric.]

[Footnote 16: Quoted in _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F.

Genung.]

[Footnote 16A: Quoted in _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F.

Genung.]

[Footnote 17: G.C.V. Holmes, quoted in _Specimens of Exposition_, H.

Lamont.]

[Footnote 18: _Effective Speaking_, Arthur Edward Phillips. This work covers the preparation of public speech in a very helpful way.]

CHAPTER XX

INFLUENCING BY DESCRIPTION

The groves of Eden vanish'd now so long, Live in description, and look green in song.

--ALEXANDER POPE, _Windsor Forest_.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with pa.s.sion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Nature_.

Like other valuable resources in public speaking, description loses its power when carried to an extreme. Over-ornamentation makes the subject ridiculous. A dust-cloth is a very useful thing, but why embroider it?

Whether description shall be restrained within its proper and important limits, or be encouraged to run riot, is the personal choice that comes before every speaker, for man's earliest literary tendency is to depict.