The Art of Public Speaking
issue to a desired phase. It is equally valuable for showing a thing in
its relation to other things, or in correlation. Classification is
closely akin to Definition and Division.
This question of the liquor traffic, sirs, takes its place
beside the grave moral issues of all times. Whatever be its
economic significance--and who is there to question
it--whatever vital bearing it has upon our political system--and
is there one who will deny it?--the question of the licensed
saloon must quickly be settled as the world in its advancement
has settled the questions of constitutional government for the
masses, of the opium traffic, of the serf, and of the slave--not
as matters of economic and political expediency but as questions
of right and wrong.
=Analysis= separates a subject into its essential parts. This it may do by
various principles; for example, analysis may follow the order of time
(geologic eras), order of place (geographic facts), logical order (a
sermon outline), order of increasing interest, or procession to a climax
(a lecture on 20th century poets); and so on. A classic example of
analytical exposition is the following:
In philosophy the contemplations of man do either penetrate unto
God, or are circumferred to nature, or are reflected or reverted
upon himself. Out of which several inquiries there do arise
three knowledges: divine philosophy, natural philosophy, and
human philosophy or humanity. For all things are marked and
stamped with this triple character, of the power of God, the
difference of nature, and the use of man.
--LORD BACON, _The Advancement of Learning_.[16]
=Division= differs only from analysis in that analysis follows the
inherent divisions of a subject, as illustrated in the foregoing
passage, while division arbitrarily separates the subject for
convenience of treatment, as in the following none-too-logical example:
For civil history, it is of three kinds; not unfitly to be
compared with the three kinds of pictures or images. For of
pictures or images, we see some are unfinished, some are
perfect, and some are defaced. So of histories we may find three
kinds, memorials, perfect histories, and antiquities; for
memorials are history unfinished, or the first or rough drafts
of history; and antiquities are history defaced, or some
remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of
time.
--LORD BACON, _The Advancement of Learning_.[16A]
=Generalization= states a broad principle, or a general truth, derived
from examination of a considerable number of individual facts. This
synthetic exposition is not the same as argumentative generalization,
which supports a general contention by citing instances in proof.
Observe how Holmes begins with one fact, and by adding another and
another reaches a complete whole. This is one of the most effective
devices in the public speaker's repertory.
Take a hollow cylinder, the bottom closed while the top remains
open, and pour in water to the height of a few inches. Next
cover the water with a flat plate or piston, which fits the
interior of the cylinder perfectly; then apply heat to the
water, and we shall witness the following phenomena. After the
lapse of some minutes the water will begin to boil, and the
steam accumulating at the upper surface will make room for
itself by raising the piston slightly. As the boiling continues,
more and more steam will be formed, and raise the piston higher
and higher, till all the water is boiled away, and nothing but
steam is left in the cylinder. Now this machine, consisting of
cylinder, piston, water, and fire, is the steam-engine in its
most elementary form. For a steam-engine may be defined as an
apparatus for doing work by means of heat applied to water; and
since raising such a weight as the piston is a form of doing
work, this apparatus, clumsy and inconvenient though it may be,
answers the definition precisely.[17]
=Reference to Experience= is one of the most vital principles in
exposition--as in every other form of discourse.
"Reference to experience, as here used, means reference to the known.
The known is that which the listener has seen, heard, read, felt,
believed or done, and which still exists in his consciousness--his stock
of knowledge. It embraces all those thoughts, feelings and happenings
which are to him real. Reference to Experience, then, means _coming into
the listener's life_.[18]
The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical
faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are
practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest affairs
of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the
marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that
by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from
fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and
deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind
upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand
thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and
Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact,
simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all
habitually, and at every moment, use carelessly.
--THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, _Lay Sermons_.
Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are
written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a
moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a
decreasing leg? an increasing belly? is not your voice broken?
your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every
part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call
yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!
--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 illustrate 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 illustrative 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 antithesis.
8. Invent two examples to illustrate the definition (question 6).
9. Invent two analogies 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 "classification," on any political, social,
economic, or moral issue of the day.
16. Make a brief analytical statement of Henry W. Grady's "The Race
Problem," page 36.
17. By what analytical 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 passage 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 passages 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 passage 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 passion 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.
_The Nature of Description_
To describe is to call up a picture in the mind of the hearer. "In
talking of description we naturally speak of portraying, delineating,
coloring, and all the devices of the picture painter. To describe is to
visualize, hence we must look at description as a pictorial process,
whether the writer deals with material or with spiritual objects."[19]
If you were asked to describe the rapid-fire gun you might go about it
in either of two ways: give a cold technical account of its mechanism,
in whole and in detail, or else describe it as a terrible engine of
slaughter, dwelling upon its effects rather than upon its structure.
The former of these processes is exposition, the latter is true