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coherent from beginning to end, and can apportion his time fairly and profitably between the respective parts of the speech and the speech as a whole.

EXAMPLE OF "PARAGRAPH OUTLINE"

Subject: Providing America with Trained Officials. Proposition: America's great need for trained leadership is a challenge to our colleges and universities. Outline: (1) Seldom has there been more caustic criticism of men in high office. (2) At a time of great crisis lawmakers fight for mere partizan advantage. (3) The reason is that we are governed by men not elected to meet the present issues and who, therefore, are out of touch with the times. (4) Worse, these officeholders do not represent a high level of special training for government. (5) So if the problems that now press for solution and those soon to arise are to be met, a new type of officeholder must be found. (6) This new type must combine expert knowledge of government, economics, and sociology with the ability to get elected. (7) This means that he must have studied politics deeply and must at the same time be able to speak and think in the language of the common people. (8) Such training can be given only in colleges and universities. (9) This great need, then, will be best served when colleges and universities turn out sociallyminded men and women trained in the science of government and skilled in speaking to the

masses.

IV

ACTION

ACTION THE FOUNDATION OF SPEECH

BODY or voice, which should be studied first? First ask, Which is mastered earlier in the struggle to learn how to communicate? Clearly the body; true of the race and of the individual man; primeval man communicated by signs before he ever talked, and children get control of their sign-making apparatus before they can control the apparatus of voice. If all children could get and keep a mastery of the body, arms, legs, viscera, head, and face there would be few poor speakers in the world. It seems almost safe to say that all speech difficulties get their origin in defects of bodily structure or of mastery of bodily parts. Hence in the study of how to improve speaking and reading the body properly comes, in point of precedence, ahead of voice.

Action an Aid to Speaking. To meet the issue of how much bodily activity is acceptable, observe men going about their business trying naïvely to get the best results they can. The lively ones are lively in bodily action as well as in mental alertness; in fact, as we shall see, live body equals live mind. It is a simple fact that most successful speakers, men who actually win and influence audiences, are, on the platform, alert, animated, never at rest, always doing something with arms, hands, legs, head, and face. Also it is easy to note that almost any

speaker who is active on the platform-within moderation-gets results, receives his full measure of success; some of them, by very virtue of this bodily alertness, get more of it than their message really deserves; while many inert speakers with vital messages fail to get a hearing worthy of their learning or of their mental and moral greatness. From such we can see that obviously action at least pays; audiences like it; it is plainly valuable in establishing good communication.

Not only is this a matter of common observation, but it is based on a fundamental psychological fact. “Live” speaking, just referred to, is in reality emotional speaking. There are very few occasions, if any, when effective speaking is not emotional. The fallacy in dry-as-dust style, or the "academic" at its barest, is the attempt to offer speaking that is unemotional. Strictly there can be no such thing; this is why there are college lecturers who become amazed that their students do not seem to grasp what they say; pearls before swine, possibly. The point is that the student does not feel himself a party to an act of genuine communication, for the very reason that the situation is rifled of those qualities that give it its emotional verve and snap.

Emotion a General Bodily Activity.-An emotion is described1 most simply as a general setting off of a burst of actions all at once. In the more intense emotions the whole body is set in motion; head jerks, arms fly about, trunk does any number of things-chiefly internal, but having a great deal to do with the state of mind-legs stiffen or weaken, take to flight, or give out entirely. So whenever the speaker gets emotionaland he always does so if he is alert and in earnest―he

1 Watson, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, 1919, p. 195: "An emotion is a hereditary 'pattern-reaction' involving profound changes of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but particularly of the visceral and glandular systems.".

is muscularly activated all over his body, or at least in the larger number of his members; most of the time, though, all over.

It is so necessarily, for one of the factors in an emotional performance is the secretion of a juice by a ductless gland, which gets into the blood, and so effects the whole body. These juices have two general affects: to excite, as in anger or fear, when something in the blood animates the muscles after the manner of alcohol or caffein; and to depress, as in grief or despair, where something in the blood slackens the muscles after the manner of an opiate or a sedative.

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How, then, can a speaker ever communicate warmly, even hotly, if his voice and words are warm and his body cold? The answer is that in reality it cannot be done, and is not even tried among men endeavoring to settle interesting and vital affairs. Judd points out:1 "There is no such condition as one of absolute rest of the hand muscles. . Experiments with ouija-boards show that the hand moves in thinking"; and it is not the hand alone, by any means. No speaking can be fully live and animated unless the liveness and animation are displayed by the thinking mechanism-the voice and the body. Of these three the body is the one to come first in time. It must; the emotion felt, which gives the speaker his urge to demand a hearing, is altogether bodily from crown to toe; and from crown to toe action is needed to give the thought adequate meaning for the listener.

Action Makes Prompt Appeal.-That the body goes before the voice is true for yet another reason; an audience almost always sees a speaker's body before it hears his voice; and from the very start what he does visibly or does not do communicates meanings to the

1 Psychology, p. 186, 1907.

audience. A speaker cannot walk out upon the platform, sit down in his chair, approach the audience, cannot sit still, or stand, even as immovable as a post, without telling his observers all manner of things. Being silent, he yet speaketh, and there is no way he can avoid it, because lack of movement can be as eloquent as movement over the whole platform.

The Eye Quicker Than the Ear.-Things seen are always more likely to carry meaning than things heard; the eye is almost in every case a keener interpreter than the ear; and we can more easily be confused by a medley of sounds than by complexity of visual objects. We hear very slowly. The eye usually apprehends a sentence or an idea at one reading, whereas the ear apprehends best after much repetition. Public speaking uses repetition and restatement much more than does written composition. Also, public speaking must be at a much slower rate than one expects to read from the printed page. This accounts for the great popularity of the pictureshow over the spoken drama; people can understand it more surely and quickly. Actions speak louder than words, we see. Speech without action is particularly hard on the hearer; it is for the highly educated only, especially people of sedentary habits, and most especially those who have had much practice in listening to public addresses. Unless you are sure that you shall speak only to listeners trained to be a kind of Quakers, better add to the power of your thinking and of your voice the power of an alert, energetic, yet controlled body.

The Academic Manner Hardly Typical.-A word of warning is in order here. Most teaching of speaking is carried on amid academic surroundings; what more natural than that academic standards should there be dominant? But it so happens that the academic world has some notions about the use of the body in speech that do not square with general experience off college

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