The Secret of Good Delivery

Chapter 6

Shortly after the close of the First World War, I met two brothers in London, Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith. They had just made the first aeroplane flight from London to Australia, had won the fifty thousand dollar prize offered by the Australian government, had created a sensation throughout the British Empire, and had been knighted by the King.
Captain Hurley, a well-known scenic photographer, had flown with them over a part of their trip, taking motion pictures; so I helped them prepare an illustrated travel talk of their flight and trained them in the delivery of it. They gave it twice daily for four months in Philharmonic Hall, London, one speaking in the afternoon and the other at night.
They had had identically the same experience, had sat side by side as they flew halfway around the world; and they delivered the same talk, almost word for word. Yet, somehow it didn’t sound like the same talk at all.
There is something besides the mere words in a talk which counts. It is the flavor with which they are delivered. “lt is not so much what you say as how you say it.”
I once sat beside a young woman at a public concert who was reading, as Paderewski played them, the notes of a Mazurka by Chopin. She was mystified. She couldn’t understand. His fingers were touching precisely the same notes that hers had touched when she had played it; yet her rendition had been commonplace, and his was inspired, a thing of surpassing beauty, a performance that held the audience enthralled. It was not the mere notes that he touched; it was the way he touched them, a feeling, an artistry, a personality that he put into the touching that made all the difference between mediocrity and genius.
Brullof, the great Russian painter, once corrected a pupil’s study. The pupil looked in amazement at the altered drawing, exclaiming: “Why, you have touched it only a tiny bit, but it is quite another thing.” Brullof replied; “Art begins where the tiny bit begins.” That is as true of speaking as it is of painting and of Paderewski’s playing.
The same thing holds true when one is touching words. There is an old saying in the English Parliament that everything depends upon the manner in which one speaks and not upon the matter. Quintillion said that long ago when England was one of the outlying colonies of Rome.
Like most old sayings, it needs to be taken cum grano sails; but good delivery will make very thin matter go a very long way. I have often noticed in college contests that it is not always the speaker with the best material who wins. Rather, it is the speaker who can talk so well that his material sounds best.
“Three things matter in a speech,” Lord Morley once observed with gay cynicism, “who says it, how he says it, and what he says—and, of the three, the last matters the least.” An exaggeration? Yes, but scratch the surface of it and you will find the truth shining through.
Edmund Burke wrote speeches so excellent in logic and reasoning and composition that they are today studied as classic models of oration in half the colleges of the land; yet Burke, as a speaker, was a notorious failure. He didn’t have the ability to deliver his gems, to make them interesting and forceful; so he was called “the dinner bell” of the House of Commons. When he arose to talk, the other members coughed and shuffled and went out in droves.
You can throw a steel-jacketed bullet at a man with all your might, and you cannot make even a dent in his clothing. But put powder behind a tallow candle and you can shoot it through a pine board. Many a tallow-candle speech with powder makes, I regret to say, more of an impression than a steel-jacketed talk with no force behind it.
Look well, therefore, to your delivery.

What Is Delivery?

What does a department store do when it “delivers” the article you have bought? Docs the driver just toss the package into the backyard and let it go at that? Is merely getting a thing out of one’s own hands the same as getting it delivered? The messenger boy with a telegram delivers the “wire” into the direct possession of the person for whom it is intended. But do all speakers?
Let me give you an illustration that is typical of the fashion in which thousands of people talk. I happened on one occasion to be stopping in Murren, a summer resort in the Swiss Alps. I was living at a hotel operated by a London company; and they usually sent out from England a couple of lecturers each week to talk to the guests. One of them was a well-known English novelist. Her topic was “The Future of the Novel.” She admitted that she had not selected the subject herself; and, the long and short of it was that she had nothing to say about it that she really cared enough about saying to make it worth while expressing. She had hurriedly made some rambling notes; and she stood before the audience, ignoring her hearers, not even looking at them, staring sometimes over their heads, sometimes at her notes, sometimes at the floor. She called off her words into the primeval void with a far-away look in her eyes and a far-away ring in her voice.
That kind of performance isn’t delivering a talk at all. It is a soliloquy. It has no sense of communication. And that is the first essential of good talking: a sense of communication. The audience must feel that there is a message being delivered straight from the mind and heart of the speaker to their minds and their hearts. The kind of talk I have just described might just as well have been spoken out in the sandy, waterless wastes of the Gobi Desert. In fact, it sounded as if it were being delivered in some such spot rather than to a group of living human beings.
This matter of delivering a talk is, at the same time, a very simple and a very intricate process. It is also a very much misunderstood and abused one.

The Secret of Good Delivery

An enormous amount of nonsense and twaddle has been written about delivery. It has been shrouded in rules and rites and made mysterious. Old-fashioned “elocution,” that abomination in the sight of God and man, has often made it ridiculous. The business man, going to the library or bookshop has found volumes on “oratory” that were utterly useless. In spite of progress in other directions, some schoolboys are still being forced to recite the ornate “oratory” of Webster and Ingersoll—a thing that is as much out of style and as far removed from the spirit of this age as the hats worn by Mrs. Ingersoll and Mrs. Webster would be if they were resurrected today.
An entirely new school of speaking has sprung up since the Civil War. In keeping with the spirit of the times, it is as direct as a telegram. The verbal fireworks that were once the vogue would no longer be tolerated by an audi­ence in this year of grace.
A modem audience, regardless of whether it is fifteen people at a business conference or a thousand people under a tent, wants the speaker to talk just as directly as he would in a chat, and in the same general manner that he would employ in speaking to one of them in conversation.
In the same manner, but not with the same amount of force. If he tries that, he will hardly be heard. In order to appear natural he has to use much more energy in talking to forty people than he does in talking to one; just as a statue on top of a building has to be of heroic size in order to make it appear of lifelike proportions to an observer on the ground.
At the close of Mark Twain’s lecture in a Nevada mining camp, an old prospector approached him and inquired: “Be them your natural tones of eloquence?”
That is what the audience wants: “your natural tones of eloquence,” enlarged a bit.
Speak to the Community Chest just as you would to John Henry Smith. What is a meeting of the Chest Com­mittee after all, but a mere collection of John Henry Smiths? Won’t the same methods that are successful with those men and women individually be successful with them collectively?
I have just described the delivery of a certain novelist. In the same ballroom in which she had spoken, I had the pleasure, a few nights later, of hearing Sir Oliver Lodge. His subject was Atoms and Worlds.” He devoted to it more than half a century of thought and study and experi­ment and investigation. He had something that was essen­tially a part of his heart and mind and life, something that he wanted very much to say. He forgot—and I, for one, thanked God that he did forget-that he was trying to make a speech. That was the least of his worries. He was concerned only with telling the audience about atoms, telling us accurately and lucidly and feelingly. He was earnestly trying to get us to see what he saw and to feel what he felt
And what was the result? He delivered a remarkable talk. It had both charm and power. It made a deep impression. He was a speaker of unusual ability. Yet I am sure he didn’t regard himself in that light. I am sure that few people who heard him ever think of him as a public speaker at all.
If you who read this book speak in public so that people hearing you will suspect that you have had training in public speaking, you will not be a credit to the author. He would desire you to speak with such intensified and exalted naturalness that your auditors would never dream that you had been trained. A good window does not call attention to itself. It merely lets in the light. A good speaker is like that. He is so natural that his hearers never notice his manner of speaking; they are conscious only of his matter.

Henry Ford’s Advice

“All Fords are exactly alike,” their maker used to say, “but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, and never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put us all in the same mold, but I say don’t let that spark be lost; it’s your only real claim to importance.”
All that is doubly true of public speaking. There is no other human being in the world like you. Hundreds of millions of people have two eyes and a nose and a mouth; but none of them look precisely like you; and none of them have exactly your traits and methods and cast of mind. Few of them will talk and express themselves just as you do when you are speaking naturally. In other words, you have an individuality. As a speaker, it is your most precious possession. Cling to it. Cherish it. Develop it. It is the spark that will put force and sincerity into your speaking. “It is your only real claim to importance.”
Sir Oliver Lodge spoke differently from other men, because he himself was different. The man’s manner of speaking was as essentially a part of his own individuality as were his beard and bald head. If he had tried to imitate Lloyd George, he would have been false, he would have failed.
The most famous despatch ever held in America took place in 1858 in the prairie towns of Illinois between Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was tall and awkward. Douglas was short and graceful. These men were as unlike in their characters and mentality and personalities and dispositions as they were in their physiques.
Douglas was the cultured man of the world. Lincoln was the rail splitter who went to the front door in his sock feet to receive company. Douglas’ gestures were graceful. Lincoln’s were ungainly. Douglas was utterly destitute of humour, Lincoln was one of the greatest story­ tellers who ever lived. Douglas seldom used a smile. Lincoln constantly argued by analogy and illustration. Douglas was haughty and overbearing. Lincoln was humble and forgiving. Douglas thought in quick flashes. Lincoln’s mental processes were much slower. Douglas spoke with the impetuous rush of a whirlwind. Lincoln was quieter and deeper and more deliberate.
Both of these men, unlike as they were, were able speakers because they had the courage and good sense to be themselves. If either had tried to imitate the other, he would have failed miserably. But each one, by using to the utmost his own peculiar talents, made himself indi­vidual and powerful. Go thou and do likewise.
That is an easy direction to give. But is it an easy one to follow? Most emphatically it is not. As Marshal Foch said of the art of war: “It is simple in its conception, but unfortunately complicated in its execution.”
It takes practice to be natural before an audience. Actors know that. When you were a little boy or girl, four years old, you probably could, had you but tried, have mounted a platform and “recited” naturally to an audience. But when you are twenty-and-four, or forty–and–four, what will happen if you mount a platform and start to speak? Will you retain that unconscious naturalness that you possessed at four? You may, but it is dollars to doughnuts that you will become stiff and stilted and mechanical, and draw back into your shell like a snapping turtle.
The problem of teaching or of training people in delivery is not one of superimposing additional characteristics; it is largely one of removing impediments, of freeing them, of getting them to speak with the same naturalness that they would display if someone were to knock them down.
Hundreds of times I have stopped speakers in the midst of their talks and implored them to “talk like a human being.” Hundreds of nights I have come home mentally fatigued and nervously exhausted from trying to drill and force people to talk naturally. No, believe me, it is not so easy as it sounds.
And the only way under high heaven by which you can get the knack of this enlarged naturalness is by practice. And, as you practice, if you find yourself talking in a stilted manner, pause and say sharply to yourself mentally: “Here! What is wrong? Wake up. Be human.” Then pick out someone in the audience, some person in the back, the dullest looking character you can find, and talk to him or her. Forget there is anyone else present at all. Converse with him. Imagine that he has asked you a question and that you are answering it. If he were to stand up and talk to you, and you were to talk back to him, that process would immediately and inevitably make your talking more conversational, more natural, more direct. So, imagine that that is precisely what is taking place.
You may go so far as actually to ask questions and answer them. For example, in the midst of your talk, you may say, “and you ask what proof have I for this asser­tion? I have adequate proof and here it is …” Then pro­ceed to answer the imaginary question. That sort of thing can be done very naturally. It will break up the monotony of one’s delivery; it will make it direct and pleasant and conversational.
Sincerity and enthusiasm and high earnestness will help you, too. When a person is under the influence of his feelings, his real self comes to the surface. The bars are down. The heat of his emotions has burned all barriers away. He acts spontaneously. He talks spontaneously. He is natural.
So, in the end, even this matter of delivery comes back to the thing which has already been emphasized repeatedly in these pages: namely, put your heart in your talks.
“I shall never forget,” said Dean Brown in his lectures on Preaching before the Yale Divinity School, “the description given by a friend of mine of a service which he once attended in the city of London. The preacher was George MacDonald. He read for the Scripture lesson that morning the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. When the time came for the sermon, he said: ‘You have all heard about these men of faith. I shall not try to tell you what faith is. There are theological professors who could do that much better than I could do it. I am here to help you believe.’ Then followed such a simple, heartfelt and majestic manifestation of the man’s own faith in those unseen realities which are eternal, as to beget faith in the minds and hearts of all his hearers. His heart was in his work, and his delivery was effective because it rested back upon the genuine beauty of his own inner life.”
“His heart was in his work.’’ That is the secret. Yet I know that advice like this is not popular. It seems vague. It sounds indefinite. The average student wants foolproof rules. Something definite. Something he can put his hands on. Rules as precise as the directions for operating a car.
That is what he wants. That is what I would like to give him. It would be easy for him. It would be easy for me. There are such rules, and there is only one little thing wrong with them: they don’t work. They take all the naturalness and spontaneity and life and juice out of speak­ing. I know. In my younger days I wasted a great deal of energy trying them. They won’t appear in these pages for, as Josh Billings observed in one of his lighter moments: “There ain’t no use in know in’ so many things that ain’t so.’’

Do You Do These Things
When You Talk in Public?

We are going to discuss here some of the features of natural speaking in order to make them more clear, more vivid. I have hesitated about doing it, for someone is almost sure to say: “Ah, I see, just force myself to do these things and I’ll be all right.” No, you won’t. Force yourself to do them and you will be all wooden and all mechanical.
You used most of these principles yesterday in your con­versation, used them as unconsciously as you digested your dinner last night. That is the way to use them. It is the only way. And it will come, as far as public speaking is con­cerned, as we have already said, only by practice.

First: Stress Important Words,
Subordinate Unimportant Ones

In conversation, we hit one syllable in a word, and hit it hard, and hurry over the others like a pay car passing a string of hoboes; e.g., MassaCHUsetts, afFLICtion, at atTRACtiveness, enVIRonment. We do almost the some thing with a sentence. We make one or two important words tower up like the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue, New York.
This is not a strange or unusual process I am describing. Listen. You can hear it going on about you all the time. You yourself did it a hundred, maybe a thousand, times yesterday. You will doubtlessly do it a hundred times tomorrow.
Here is an example. Read the following quotation, striking the words in big type hard. Run over the others quickly. What is the effect?
I have SUCCEEDED in whatever I have undertaken, because I have WILLED it. I have NEVER HESITATED which has given me an ADVANTAGE over the rest of mankind—Napoleon.
This is not the only way to read these lines. Another speaker would do it differently perhaps. There are no ironclad rules for emphasis. It all depends.
Read these selections aloud in an earnest manner, trying to make the ideas clear and convincing. Don’t you find yourself stressing the big, important words and hurrying over the others?

If you think you are beaten, you are.
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you’d like to win, but think you can’t,
It’s almost a cinch you won’t.
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.

—Anon.

Perhaps there is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution. The boy who is going to make a great man, or is going to count in any way in afterlife, must make up in his mind not merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.
—Theodore Roosevelt.

Second: Change Your Pitch

The pitch of our voices in conversation flows up and down the scale from high to low and back again, never resting, but always shifting like the face of the sea. Why? No one knows, and no one cares. The effect is pleasing, and it is the way of nature. We never had to learn to do this: it came to us as children, unsought and unaware, but let us stand up and face an audience, and the chances are our voices will become as dull, flat and monotonous as the alkali deserts of Nevada.
When you find yourself talking in a monotonous pitch— and usually it will be a high one—just pause for a second and say to yourself: “I am speaking like a wooden Indian. Talk to these people. Be human. Be natural.”
Will that kind of lecture to yourself help you any? A little, perhaps. The pause itself will help you. You have to work out your own salvation by practice.
You can make any phrase or word that you choose stand out like a green bay tree in the front yard by either suddenly lowering or raising your pitch on it. Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, the famous Congregational minister of Brooklyn, often did it. So did Sir Oliver Lodge. So did Bryan. So did Roosevelt. So does almost every speaker of note.
In the following quotations, try saying the italicized words in a much lower pitch than you use for the rest of the sentence. What is the effect?
I have but one merit, that of never despairing.­
—Marshal Foch.
The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.
—Herbcrt Spencer.
I have lived eighty-six years. I have watched men climb up to success, hundreds of them, and of all the elements that are important for success, the most important is faith.
—Cardina! Gibbons.

Third: Vary Your Rate of Speaking

When a little child talks, or when we talk in ordinary conversation, we constantly change our rate of speaking. It is pleasing. It is natural. It is unconscious. It is emphatic. It is, in fact, one of the very best of all possible ways to make an idea stand out prominently.
Walter B. Stevens, in his Reporter’s Lincoln, issued by the Missouri Historical Society, tells us that this was one of Lincoln’s favorite methods of driving a point home:
He would speak several words with great rapidity, come to the word or phrase he wished to emphasize, and let his voice linger and bear hard on that, and then he would rush to the end of his sentence like lightning… He would devote as much time to the word or two he wished to emphasize as he did to half a dozen less important words following it.
Such a method invariably arrests attention. To illustrate: I have often quoted in a public talk the following statement by Cardinal Gibbons. I wanted to emphasize the idea of courage; so I lingered on these italicized words, drew them out and spoke as if I, myself, were impressed with them—and I was. Will you please read the selection aloud, trying the same method and note the results.
A short time before his death, Cardinal Gibbons said: “I have lived eighty-six years. I have watched men climb up to success, hundreds of them, and of all the elements that are important for success, the most important is faith. No great thing comes to any man unless he has courage.”
Try this: say “thirty million dollars” quickly and with an air of triviality so that it sounds like a very small sum. Now, say “thirty thousand dollars”; say it slowly; say it feelingly; say it as if you were tremendously impressed with the hugeness of the amount. Haven’t you now made the thirty thousand sound larger than the thirty million?

Fourth: Pause Before and After Important Ideas

Lincoln often paused in his speaking. When he had come to a big idea that he wished to impress deeply on the minds of his hearers, he bent forward, looked directly into their eyes for a moment and said nothing at all. This sudden silence had the same effect as a sudden noise: it attracted notice. It made everyone attentive, alert, awake to what was coming next. For example, when his famous debates with Douglas were drawing to a close, when all the indications pointed to his defeat, he became depressed, his old habitual melancholy stealing over him at times, and imparting to his words a touching pathos. In one of his concluding speeches, he suddenly “stopped and stood silent for a moment, looking around upon the throng of half­ indifferent, half-friendly faces before him, with those deep­ sunken weary eyes that always seemed full of unshod tears. Folding his hands, as if they too were tired of the helpless fight, he said, in his peculiar monotone: ‘My friends, it makes little difference, very little difference, whether Judge Douglas or myself is elected to the United States Senate; but the great issue which we have submitted to you to-day is far above and beyond any personal interests or the political fortunes of any man. And my friends,” here he paused again, and the audience were intent on every word, ‘that issue will live and breathe and bum when the poor, feeble, stammering tongues of Judge Douglas and myself are silent in the grave”.
“These simple words,” relates one of his biographers, “and the manner in which they were spoken, touched every heart to the core.”
Lincoln also paused after the phrases he wanted to emphasize. He added to their force by keeping silent while the meaning sank in and effected its mission.
Sir Oliver Lodge paused frequently in his speaking, both before and after important ideas; paused as often as three or four times in one sentence, but he did it naturally and unconsciously. No man, unless he were analyzing Sir Oliver’s methods, would notice it.
“By your silence,” said Kipling, “ye shall speak.” No where is silence more golden than when it is judiciously used in talking. It is a powerful tool, too important to be ignored, yet it is usually neglected by the beginning speaker.
In the following excerpt from Holman’s Ginger Talks, I have marked the places where a speaker might profitably pause. I do not say that these are the only places where one ought to pause, or even the best places. I say only that it is one way of doing it. Where to pause is not a matter of hard and fast rules. It is a matter of meaning and temperament and feeling. You might pause one place in a speech to-day, and in another place in the same speech tomorrow.
Read this selection aloud without pausing; then read it again, making the pauses I have indicated. What is the effect of the pauses?
“Selling goods is a battle” (pause and let the idea of battle soak in) “and only fighters can win in it.” (Pause and let that point soak in.) “We may not like these conditions, but we didn’t have the making of them and we can’t alter them.” (Pause.) “Take your courage with you when you enter the sculling game.” (Pause.) “If you don’t,” (pause and lengthen out suspense for a second) “you’ll strike out every time you come to bat, and score nothing higher than a string of goose eggs.” (Pause.) “No man ever made a three-base hit who was afraid of the pitcher” (pause and let your point soak in)—“remember that.” (Pause and let it soak in some more.) “The fellow who knocks the cover off the ball or lifts it over the fence for a home run is always the chap who steps up to the plate” (pause and increase the suspense as to what you are going to say about this extraordinary player) “with grim determination in his heart.”
Read the following quotations aloud and with force and meaning. Observe where you naturally pause.
The great American desert is not located in Idaho, New Mexico or Arizona. It is located under the hat of the average man. The great American desert is a mental desert rather than a physical desert. —J. S. Knox.
There is no panacea for human ills; the nearest approach to it is publicity.    —Professor Foxwell.
There are two people I must please—God and Garfield. I must live with Garfield here, with God hereafter.
—James A. Garfield.
A speaker may follow the directions I have set down in this chapter and still have a hundred faults. He may talk in public just as he does in conversation and consequently, he may speak with an unpleasant voice and make grammatical errors and be awkward and offensive and do a score of unpleasant things. A person’s natural method of everyday talking may need a vast number of improvements. Perfect your natural method of talking in conversation, and then carry that method to the platform.

Summary

  1. There is something besides the mere words in a talk which counts. It is the flavor with which they are delivered. “It is not so much what you say as how you say it.”
  2. Many speakers ignore their hearers, stare over their heads or at the floor. They seem to be delivering a soliloquy. There is no sense of communication, no give and take between the audience and the speaker. That kind of attitude would kill a conversation; it also kills a speech.
  3. Good delivery is conversational tone and directness enlarged. Talk to the Community Chest just as you would to John Smith. What is the Chest Committee, after all, but a collection of John Smiths?
  4. Everyone has the ability to deliver a talk. If you question this statement, try it out for yourself; knock down the most ignorant man you know; when he gets on his feet, he will probably say some things, and his manner of say­ ing them will be almost flawless. We want you to take that same naturalness with you when you speak in public. To develop it, you must practice. Don’t imitate others. If you speak spontaneously you will speak differently from any­ one else in the world. Put your own individuality, your own characteristic manner into your delivery.
  5. Talk to your hearers just as if you expected them to stand up in a moment and talk back to you. If they were to rise and ask you questions, your delivery would almost be sure to improve emphatically and at once. So imagine that someone has asked you a question, and that you are repeating it. Say aloud, “You ask how do I know this? I’ll tell you”… That sort of thing will seem perfectly natural; it will break up the formality of your phraseology; it will warm and humanize your manner of talking.
  6. Put your heart into your talking. Real emotional sincerity will help more than all the rules in Christendom.
  7. Here are four things that all of us do unconsciously in earnest conversation. But do you do them when you are talking in public? Most people do not.
  • a. Do you stress the important words in a sentence and subordinate the unimportant ones? Do you give almost every word including the, and, but, approximately the same amount of attention, or do you speak a sentence in much the same way that you say MassCHUsetts?
  • b. Does the pitch of your voice flow up and down the scale from high to low and back again—as the pitch of a little child does when speaking?
  • c. Do you vary your rate of speaking, running rapidly over the unimportant words, spending more time on the ones you wish to make stand out?
  • d. Do you pause before and after your important ideas?

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