Chapter 7
The Carnegie Institute of Technology at one time gave intelligence tests to one hundred prominent business men. The tests were similar to those used in the army during the war; and the results led the Institute to declare that personality contributes more to business success than docs superior intelligence.
That is a very significant pronouncement: very significant for the business man, very significant for the educator, very significant for the professional man, very significant for the speaker.
Personality—with the exception of preparation—is probably the most important factor in public address. “in eloquent speaking,” declared Elbert Hubbard, “it is manner that wins, not words.” Rather it is manner plus ideas. But personality is a vague and elusive thing, defying analysis like the perfume of the violet. It is the whole combination of the person: physical, spiritual, mental; traits, predilections, tendencies, temperament, cast of mind, vigor, experience, training, the whole life. It is as complex as Einstein’s theory of relativity, almost as little understood.
A personality is determined by inheritance and environment and is extremely difficult to alter or improve. Yet we can, by taking thought, strengthen it to some extent and make it more forceful, more attractive. At any rate, we can strive to get the utmost possible out of this strange thing that nature has given us. The subject is of vast importance to every one of us. The possibilities for improvement, limited as they are, are still large enough to warrant a discussion and investigation.
If you wish to make the most of your individuality, go before your audience rested. A tired speaker is not magnetic nor attractive. Don’t make the all-too-common error of putting off your preparation and your planning until the very last moment, and then working at a furious pace, trying to make up for lost time. If you do, you are bound to store up bodily poisons and brain fatigues that will prove terrific drags, holding you down, sapping your vitality, weakening both your brain and your nerves.
If you must make an important talk to a committee meeting at four, have a light lunch, if possible, and the refreshment of a siesta. Rest—that is what you need, physical and mental and nervous.
Geraldine Farrar used to shock her newly made friends by saying good night and retiring early, leaving them to talk the remainder of the evening with her husband. She knew the demands of her art.
Madame Nordica said that being a prima donna meant giving up everything one liked: social affairs, friends, tempting meals.
When you have to make an important talk, beware of your hunger. Eat as sparingly as a saint. On Sunday afternoons, Henry Ward Beecher used to have crackers and milk at five, and nothing after that.
“When I am singing in the evening,” said Madame Melba, “I do not dine but have a very light repast at five o’clock, consisting of either fish, chicken, or sweetbread, with a baked apple and a glass of water. I always find my self very hungry for supper when I get home from the opera or concert.”
How wisely Melba and Beecher acted, I never realized until after I became a professional speaker myself and tried to deliver a two-hour talk each evening after having consumed a hearty meal. Experience taught me that I couldn’t enjoy a filet de sole aux pommes nature and follow that by a beefsteak and French fried potatoes and salad and vegetables and a dessert, and then stand up an hour afterward and do either myself or my subject or my body justice. The blood that ought to have been in my brain was down in my stomach wrestling with that steak and potatoes. Paderewski was right: he said when he ate what he wanted to eat before a concert, the animal in him got uppermost, that it even got into his finger tips and clogged and dulled his playing.
Why One Speaker Draws Better Than Another
Do nothing to dull your energy. It is magnetic. Vitality, aliveness, enthusiasm: they are among the first qualities I have always sought for in employing speakers and instructors of speaking. People cluster around the energetic speaker, the human dynamo of energy, like wild geese around a field of autumn wheat.
I have often seen this illustrated by the open-air speakers in Hyde Park, London. A spot near Marble Arch entrance is a rendezvous for speakers of every creed and color. On a Sunday afternoon, one can take his choice and listen to a Catholic explaining the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope, to a Socialist propounding the economic gospel of Karl Marx, to an Indian explaining why it is right and proper for a Mohammedan to have two wives, and so on. Hundreds crowd about one speaker, while his neighbour has only a handful. Why? Is the topic always an adequate explanation of the disparity between the drawing powers of different speakers? No. More often the explanation is to be found in the speaker himself: he is more interested and, consequently, interesting. He talks with more life and spirit. He radiates vitality and animation; they always challenge attention.
How Are You Affected by Clothes?
An inquiry was sent to a large group of people by a psychologist and university president, asking them the impression clothes made on them. All but unanimously, they testified that when they were well groomed and faultlessly and immaculately attired, the knowledge of it, the feeling of it, had an effect which, while it was difficult to explain, was still very definite, very real. It gave them more confidence; brought them increased faith in themselves; heightened their self-respect. They declared that when they had the look of success they found it easier to think success, to achieve success. Such is the effect of clothes on the wearer himself.
What effect do they have on an audience? I have noticed time and again that if the speaker is a man with baggy trousers, shapeless coat and footwear, fountain pen and pencils peeping out of his breast pocket, a newspaper or a pipe and can of tobacco sticking out the sides of his garment, or is a woman with an ugly, bulging purse and with her slip showing—I have noticed that an audience has as little respect for that person as the speaker has for his or her own appearance. Aren’t they very likely to assume that the mind is as sloppy as the unkempt hair, unpolished shoes, or bulging handbag?
One of the Regrets of Grant’s Life
When General Lee came to Appomattox Court House to surrender his army, he was immaculately attired in a new uniform and, at his side, hung a sword of extraordinary value. Grant was coatless and sword less, and was wearing the shirt and trousers of a private. “I must have contrasted very strangely,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high, and of fault less form.” The fact that he had not been appropriately attired for this historic occasion came to be one of the real regrets of Grant’s life.
The Department of Agriculture in Washington has several hundred stands of bees on its experimental farm. Each hive has a large magnifying glass built into it, and the interior can be flooded with electric light by pressing a button; so, any moment, night or day, these bees are liable to be subject to the minutest scrutiny. A speaker is like that: he is under the magnifying glass, he is in the spotlight, all eyes are upon him. The smallest disharmony in his personal appearance now looms up like Pike’s Peak from the plains.
“Even Before We Speak,
We Are Condemned or Approved”
A number of years ago I was writing for the American Magazine the life story of a certain New York banker. I asked one of his friends to explain the reason for his success. No small amount of it, he said, was due to the man’s winning smile. At first thought, that may sound like exaggeration but I believe it is really true. Other men, scores of them, hundreds of them, may have had more experience and as good financial judgment, but he had an additional asset they didn’t possess—he had a most agreeable personality. And a warm, welcoming smile was one of the striking features of it. It gained one’s confidence immediately. It secured one’s good will instantly. We all want to see a man like that succeed; and it is a real pleasure to give him our patronage.
“He who cannot smile,” says a Chinese proverb, “ought not to keep a shop.” And isn’t a smile just as welcome before an audience as behind a counter? I am thinking now of a particular student who attended a course in public speaking conducted by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. He always came out before the audience with an air that said he liked to be there, that he loved the job that was before him. He always smiled and acted as if he were glad to see us; and so immediately and inevitably his hearers warmed toward him and welcomed him.
But I have seen speakers who walked out in a cold, perfunctory manner as if they had a disagreeable task to perform, and would thank God when it was over. We in the audience were soon feeling the same way. These attitudes are contagious.
“Like begets like,” observes Professor Overstreet in Influencing Human Behaviour. “If we are interested in our audience, there is a likelihood that our audience will be interested in us. If we scowl at our audience, there is every likelihood that inwardly or outwardly they will scowl at us. If we are timid and rather flustered, they likewise will lack confidence in us. If we are brazen and boastful, they will react with their own self-protective egotism. Even before we speak, very often, we are condemned or approved. There is every reason, therefore, that we should make certain that our attitude is such as to elicit ware response.
Crowd Your Audience Together
As a public lecturer, I have frequently spoken to a small audience scattered through a large hall in the afternoon, and to a large audience packed into the same hall at night. The evening audience has laughed heartily at the same things that brought only a smile to the faces of the afternoon group; the evening crowd has applauded generously at the very places where the afternoon gathering was utterly unresponsive. Why?
For one thing, the elderly women and the children that are likely to come in the afternoon cannot be expected to be as demonstrative as the more vigorous and discriminating evening crowd; but that is only a partial explanation.
The fact is that no audience will be easily moved when it is scattered. Nothing so dampens enthusiasm as wide, open spaces and empty chairs between the listeners.
Henry Ward Beecher said in his Yale Lectures on Preaching.
People often say, “Do you not think it is much more inspiring to speak to a large audience than a small one?” No, I say; I can speak just as well to twelve persons as to a thousand. provided those twelve are crowded around me and close together, so that they can touch each other. But even a thousand, people with four feet of space between every two of them, would be just the same as an empty room….Crowd your audience together and you will set them off with half the effort.
A man in a large audience tends to lose his individuality. He becomes a member of the crowd and is swayed far more easily than he would be as a single individual. He will laugh at and applaud things that would leave him unmoved if he were only one of half a dozen people listening to you.
It is far easier to get people to act as a body than to act singly. Men going into battle, for example, invariably want to do the most dangerous and reckless thing in the world they want to huddle together. During the late war, German soldiers were known to go into battle at times with their arms locked about one another.
Crowds! Crowds! Crowds! They are a curious phenomenon. All great popular movements and reforms have been carried forward by the aid of the crowd mentality. An interesting book on this subject is Everett Dean Martin’s The Behaviour of Crowds.
If we are going to talk to a small group, we should choose a small room. Better to pack the aisles of a small place than to have people scattered through the lonely, deadening spaces of a large hall.
If your hearers are scattered, ask them to move down front and be seated near you. Insist on this, before you start speaking.
Unless the audience is a fairly large one, and there is a real reason, a necessity, for the speaker to stand on a platform, don’t do so. Get down on the same level with them. Stand near them. Break up all formality. Get an intimate contact. Make the thing conversational.
Major Pond Smashed the Windows
Keep the air fresh. In the well-known process of public speaking, oxygen is just as essential as the larynx, pharynx and human epiglottis. All the eloquence of Cicero, and all the feminine pulchritude in the Music Hall Rockettes, could hardly keep an audience awake in a room poisoned with bad air. So, when I am one of a number of speakers, before beginning, I almost always ask the audience to stand up and rest for two minutes while the windows are thrown open.
For fourteen years Major James B. Pond travelled over the United States and Canada as manager for Henry Ward Beecher when that famous Brooklyn preacher was at his flood tide as a popular lecturer. Before the audience assembled, Pond always visited the hall or church or theatre where Beecher was to appear, and rigorously inspected the lighting, seating, temperature and ventilation.
Pond had been a blustering, roaring old any officer; he loved to exercise authority; so if the place was too warm or the air was dead and he could not get the windows open, he hurled books through them, smashing and shattering the glass. He believed with Surgeon that “the next best thing to the Grace of God for a preacher is oxygen.”
Let There Be Light—on Your Face
Unless you are demonstrating Spiritualism before a group of people, flood the room, if possible, with lights. It is as easy to domesticate a quail as to develop enthusiasm in a half-lighted room gloomy as the inside of a thermos bottle.
Read David Belasco’s articles on stage production, and you will discover that the average speaker does not have the foggiest shadow of the ghost of an idea of the tremendous importance of proper lighting.
Let the light strike your face. People want to see you. The subtle changes that ought to play across your features are a part, and a very real part, of the process of self expression. Sometimes they mean more than your words. If you stand directly under a light, your face may be dimmed by a shadow; if you stand directly in front of a light, it is sure to be. Would it not, then, be the part of wisdom to select, before you arise to speak, the spot that will give you the most advantageous illumination?
No Trumpery on the Platform
And do not hide behind a table. People want to look at the whole man. They will even lean out in the aisles to see all of him.
Some well-meaning soul is pretty sure to give you a table and a water pitcher and a glass; but if your throat becomes dry, a pinch of salt or a taste of lemon will start the saliva again better than Niagara.
You do not want the water nor the pitcher. Neither do you want all the other useless and ugly impedimenta that clutter up the average platform.
The Broadway salesrooms of the various automobile makers are beautiful, orderly, pleasing to the eye. The Paris offices of the large perfumers and jewellers are artistically and luxuriously appointed. Why? It is good business. One has more respect, more confidence, more admiration for a concern housed like that.
For the same reason, a speaker ought to have a pleasing background. The ideal arrangement, to my way of thinking, would be no furniture at all. Nothing behind the speaker to attract attention, or at either side of him—nothing but a curtain of dark blue velvet.
But what does he usually have behind him? Maps and signs and tables, perhaps a lot of dusty chairs, some piled on top of the others. And what is the result? A cheap, slovenly, disorderly atmosphere. So clear all the trumpery away.
“The most important thing in public speaking,” said Henry Ward Beecher, “is the man.”
So let the speaker stand out like the snowclad tops of the Jungfrau towelling against the blue skies of Switzerland.
No Guests on the Platform
I was once in London, Ontario, when the Prime Minister of Canada was speaking. Presently the janitor, armed with a long pole, started to ventilate the room, moving about from window to window. What happened? The audience, almost to a man, ignored the speaker for a little while and stared at the janitor as intently as if he had been performing some miracle.
An audience cannot resist—or, what comes to the same thing, it will not resist—the temptation to look at moving objects. If a speaker will only remember that truth, he can save himself some trouble and needless annoyance.
First, he can refrain from twiddling his thumbs, playing with his clothes and making little nervous movements that detract from him. I remember seeing a New York audience watch a well-known speaker’s hands for half an hour while he spoke and played with the covering of a pulpit at the same time.
Second, the speaker should arrange, if possible, to have the audience seated so they won’t have their attention distracted by seeing the late comers enter.
Third, he should have no guests on the platform. A few years ago Raymond Robins delivered a series of talks in Brooklyn. Along with a number of others, I was invited to sit on the platform with him. I declined on the ground that it was unfair to the speaker. I noted the first night how many of these guests shifted about and put one leg over the other and back again, and so on; and every time one of them moved, the audience looked away from the speaker to the guest. I called Mr. Robins’ attention to this the next day; and during the remainder of his evenings with us, he very wisely occupied the platform alone.
David Bellicose did not permit the use of red flowers on the stage because they attract too much attention. Then why should a speaker permit a restless human being to sit facing the audience while he talks? He shouldn’t. And, if he is wise, he won’t.
The Art of Sitting Down
Isn’t it well for the speaker himself not to sit facing the audience before he begins? Isn’t it better to arrive as a fresh exhibit than an old one?
But, if we must sit, let us be careful of how we sit. You have seen men look around to find a chair with the modified movements of a foxhound lying down for the night. They turned around and when they did locate a chair, they doubled up and flopped down into it with all the self control of a sack of sand.
A man who knows how to sit feels the chair strike the back of his legs, and, with his body easily erect from head to hips, he sinks into it with his body under perfect control.
Poise
We just said, a few pages previously, not to play with your clothes or your jewellery because it attracted attention. There is another reason also. lt gives an impression of weakness, a lack of self-control. Every movement that does not add to your presence detracts from it. There are no neutral movements. None. So stand still and control yourself physically and that will give you an impression of mental control, of poise.
After you have risen to address your audience, do not be in a hurry to begin. That is the hallmark of the amateur. Take a deep breath. Look over your audience for a moment; and, if there is a noise or disturbance, pause until it quiets down.
Hold your chest high. But why wait until you get before an audience to do this? Why not do it daily in private? Then you will do it unconsciously in public.
“Not one man in ten,” said Luther H. Gulick in his book, The Efficient Life, “carries himself so as to look his best… Keep the neck pressed against the collar.” Here is a daily exercise he recommends: “Inhale slowly and as strongly as possible. At the same time press the neck back firmly against the collar. Now bold it there hard. There is no harm in doing this in an exaggerated way. The object is to straighten out that part of the back which is directly between the shoulders. This deepens the chest.”
And what shall you do with your bands? Forget them. If they fall naturally to your sides, that is ideal. If they feel like a bunch of bananas to you, do not be deluded into imagining that anyone else is paying the slightest attention to them or has the slightest interest in them.
They will look best hanging relaxed at your sides. They will attract the minimum of attention there. Not even the hypercritical can criticize that position. Besides, they will be unhampered and free to flow naturally into gestures when the urge makes itself felt.
But suppose that you are very nervous and that you find putting them behind your back, shoving them into your pockets or resting them on the rostrum, helps to relieve your self-consciousness—what should you do? Use your common sense. I have heard a number of the celebrated speakers of this generation. Many, if not most, put their hands into their pockets occasionally while speaking. Bryan did it. Chancery M. Depew did it. Teddy Roosevelt did it. Even so fastidious a dandy as Disraeli sometimes succumbed to this temptation. But the sky did not fall and, according to the weather reports, if my memory serves me right, the sun came up on time as usual the next morning. If a person has something to say worth while, and says it with contagious conviction, surely it will matter little what he does with his hands and feet. If his head is full and heart stirred, these secondary details will very largely take care of themselves. After all, the stupendously important thing in making a talk is the psychological aspect of it, not the position of the hands and feet.
Absurd Antics Taught in the Name of Gesture
And this brings us very naturally to the much abused question of gesture. My first lesson in public speaking was given by the president of a college in the Middle West. This lesson, as I remember it, was chiefly concerned with gesturing; it was not only useless but misleading and positively harmful. I was taught to let my arm hang loosely at my side, palm facing the rear, fingers half closed and thumb touching my leg. I was drilled to bring the arm up in a graceful curve, to make a classical swing with the wrist and then to unfold the forefinger first, the second finger next, and the little finger last. When the whole aesthetic and ornamental movement had been executed, the arm was then to retrace the same graceful and unnatural curve and rest again by the side of the leg. The whole performance was wooden and affected. There was nothing sensible or honest about it. I was drilled to act as no one, in his right mind, ever acted anywhere.
There was no attempt whatever to get me to put my own individuality into my movements; no attempt to spur me on to feeling like gesturing; no endeavour to get the flow and blood of life in the process, and make it natural and unconscious and inevitable; no urging me to let go, to be spontaneous, to break through my shell of reserve, to talk and act like a human being. No, the whole regrettable performance was as mechanical as a typewriter, as lifeless as a last year’s bird nest, as ridiculous as a Punch and Judy show.
It seems incredible that such absurd antics could have been taught in the twentieth century, yet only a few years ago a book about gesturing was published—a whole book trying to make automatons out of men, telling them which gesture to make on this sentence, which to make on that, which to make with one hand, which with both, which to make high, which to make medium, which to make low, how to hold this finger and how to hold that. I have seen twenty men at a time standing before a class, all reading the same ornate oratorical selection from such a book, all making precisely the same gestures on precisely the same words, and all making themselves precisely ridiculous. Artificial, time-killing, mechanical, injurious—it has brought this whole subject into disrepute with many people. The dean of a large college in Massachusetts recently said that his institution had no course in public speaking because he had never seen one that was practical one that taught how to speak sensibly. My sympathy was all with the dean.
Nine-tenths of the stuff that has been written on gestures has been a waste and worse than a waste of good white paper and good black ink. Any gesture that is gotten out of a book is very likely to look like it. The place to get it is out of yourself, out of your heart, out of your mind, out of your own interest in the subject, out of your own desire to make someone else see as you see, out of your own impulses. The only gestures that are worth one, two, three, are those that are born on the spur of the instant. An ounce of spontaneity is worth a ton of rules.
Gesture is not a thing to be put on at will like a dinner jacket. It is merely an outward expression of inward condition just as are kisses and colic and laughter and seasickness.
And a man’s gestures, like his toothbrush, should be very personal things. And, as all people are different, their gestures will be individual if they will only act natural.
No two persons should be drilled to gesture in precisely the same fashion. Imagine trying to make the long, awkward slow-thinking Lincoln gesture in the same fashion as did the rapidly-talking, impetuous and polished Douglas. It would be ridiculous.
“Lincoln,” according to his biographer and law partner, Herndon, ‘’did not gesticulate as much with his hands as with his head. He used the latter frequently, throwing it with vim this way and that. This movement was a significant one when he sought to enforce his statement. It sometimes came with a quick jerk, as if throwing off electric sparks into combustible material. He never sawed the air or rent space into tatters and rags as some orators do. He never acted for stage effect… As he moved along in his speech he became freer and less uneasy in his movements; to that extent he was graceful. He had a perfect naturalness, a strong individuality; and to that extent he was dignified. He despised glitter, show, set forms and shams… There was a world of meaning and emphasis in the long, bony finger of his right hand as he dotted the ideas on the minds of his hearers. Sometimes, to express joy or pleasure, he would raise both hands at an angle of about fifty degrees, the palms upward, as if desirous of embracing the spirit of that which he loved. If the sentiment was one of detestation—denunciation of slavery, for example—both arms, thrown upward and fists clenched, swept through the air, and he expressed an execration that was truly sublime. This was one of his most effective gestures, and signified most vividly a fixed determination to drag down the object of his hatred and trample it in the dust. He always stood squarely on his feet, toe even with toe; that is, he never put one foot before the other. He neither touched nor leaned on anything for support. He made but few changes in his positions and attitudes. He never ranted, never walked backward and forward on the platform. To ease his arms, he frequently caught hold, with his left hand, of the lapel of his coat, keeping his thumb upright and leaving his right hand free to gesticulate.” St. Gaudens caught him in just that attitude in the statue which stands in Lincoln Park, Chicago.
Such was Lincoln’s method. Theodore Roosevelt was more vigorous, fiery, active, his whole face alive with feeling, his fist clenched, his entire body an instrument of expression. Bryan often used the outstretched hand with open palm. Gladstone often struck a table or his open palm with his fist, or stamped his foot with a resounding thud on the floor. Lord Rosebery used to raise his right arm and bring it down with a bold sweep that had tremendous force. Ah, but there was force first in the speaker’s thoughts and convictions; that was what made the gesture strong and spontaneous.
Spontaneity… life… they are the summon bonbon of action. Burke was angular and exceedingly awkward in his gestures. Pitt sawed the air with his arms “like a clumsy clown… Sir” Henry Irving was handicapped by a lame leg and decidedly odd movements. Lord Macaulay’s actions on the platform were ungainly. So were Grattan’s. So were Parnell’. “The answer then appears to be,” said the late Lord Curzon at Cambridge University, in an address on Parliamentary Eloquence, “that great public speakers make their own gestures; and that while a great orator is doubtless aided by a handsome exterior and graceful action, it does not matter very much if he happens to be ugly and awkward.”
Many years ago, I heard the famous Gypsy Smith preach. I was enthralled by the eloquence of this man who had led so many thousands to Christ. He used gestures lots of them—and was no more conscious of them than of the air he breathed. Such is the ideal way.
And such is the way you will find yourself making gestures if you will but practice and apply these principles. I can’t give you any rules for gesturing, for everything depends upon the temperament of the speaker, upon his preparation, his enthusiasm, his personality, the subject, the audience, the occasion.
Suggestions That May Prove Helpful
Here are, however, a few limited suggestions that may prove useful. Do not repeat one gesture until it be comes monotonous. Do not make short, jerky movements from the elbow. The movements from the shoulder look better on the platform. Do not end your gestures too quickly. If you are using the index finger to drive horne your thought. do not be afraid to hold that gesture through an entire sentence. The failure to do this is a very common error and a serious one. It distorts your emphasis, making small things unimportant, and truly important points seem trivial by comparison.
When you are doing real speaking before a real audience, make only the gestures that come natural. But while you are practicing, force yourself, if necessary, to use gestures. Force yourself to do it, and the doing of it will so awaken and stimulate you that your gestures will soon be coming unsought.
Shut your book. You can’t learn gestures from a printed page. Your own impulses, as you are speaking, are more to be trusted, more valuable than anything any instructor can possibly tell you.
If you forget all else we have said about gesture and delivery, remember this: if a man is so wrapped up in what he has to say, if he is so eager to get his message across that he forgets himself and talks and acts spontaneously, then his gestures and his delivery, unstudied though they may be, are very likely to be almost above criticism. If you doubt this, walk up to a man and knock him down. You will probably discover that, when he regains his feet, the talk he delivers will be well nigh flawless as a gem of eloquence.
Here are the best eleven words I have ever read on the subject of delivery:
Fill up the barrel.
Knock out the bung.
Let nature caper.
Summary
- According to experiments conducted by the Carnegie Institute of Technology, personality has more to do with business success than has superior knowledge. This pronouncement is as true of speaking as of business. Personality, however is such an intangible, elusive, mysterious thing that it is almost impossible to give directions for developing it, but some of the suggestions given in this chapter will help a speaker to appear at his best.
- Don’t speak when you are tired. Rest, recuperate, store up a reserve of energy.
- Eat sparingly before you speak.
- Do nothing to dull your energy. It is magnetic. People cluster around the energetic speaker like wild geese around a field of autumn wheat.
- Dress neatly, attractively. The consciousness of being well dressed heightens one’s self-respect, increases self–confidence. If a speaker has baggy trousers, unkempt shoes, ungroomed hair, fountain pen and pencils peeping out of his coat pocket, or a bulging, ugly handbag, the audience is liable to feel as little respect for the person as he seems to feel for himself.
- Smile. Come before your hearers with an attitude that seems to say you are glad to be there. “Like begets like,” says Professor Overstreet. “If we are interested in our audience there is every likelihood that our audience will be interested in us. Even before we speak, very often, we are condemned or approved. There is every reason, therefore, that we should make certain that our attitude is such as to elicit warm response.”
- Crowd your audience together. No group is easily influenced when it is scattered. An individual, as a member of a compact audience, will laugh at, applaud and approve things that he might question and oppose if he were addressed singly or if he were one of a group scattered through a large room.
- If you are speaking to a small group, pack them in a small room. Don’t stand on a platform. Get down on the same level with them. Make your talk intimate, informal, conversational.
- Keep the air fresh.
- Flood the place with lights. Stand so that the light will fall directly in your face, so all your features can be seen.
- Don’t stand behind furniture. Push the tables and chairs to one side. Clear away all the unsightly signs and trumpery that often clutter up a platform.
- If you have guests on the platform, they are sure to move occasionally; and, each time they make the slightest movement, they are certain to seize the attention of your hearers. An audience cannot resist the temptation to look at any moving object or animal or person; so why store up trouble and create competition for yourself?
