Strange how careful people are about dress, how sure that dignity and good taste in dress help to make one's success in getting on in the world; and, at the same time, how careless these same people are about What were all the attributes of man, his personal accomplishments, and his boasted reason, without the faculty of speech! To excel in A. Speech Develops as a Means of Satisfying Wants. B. Speech Begins as Random Activity. D. Making and Interpreting Signs. A. Speech is a Two-sided Activity. B. The Fundamental Purpose of Speech. IV. Importance of Good Speech. A. Speech as Man's Greatest Invention. B. Failure in Speech and Failure in Life. 1 V. Tests of Good Speaking. A. Controlled by Definite Purpose. C. Secures and Holds Attention. VI. Sources of Iruerestingness. A. Evidence of Being Throughly Alive. 2. Tastes determined by degree of culture. 3. Tastes determined by circumstances and conditions. D. Sympathy and Tact. E. Variety of Voice and Action. VII. Summary. SPEECH Speech is like a good many other things that we meet every day; we do not really understand its weaknesses or appreciate its merits. We treat it much as we treat the family, the school, the community-we merely take it for granted and assume that it is what it is, and that there is little use trying to change it. Human nature is so constituted that when we have lived with a thing or person for a long time, we get into the habit of making the best of a good or bad bargain and letting it go at that. Yet education and civilization are both a kind of staircase by which we rise from the imperfect, the unsatisfactory, the weak, to the perfect, the satisfactory, and the effective. In no school subject more than in Speech Training, probably, is there so much truth in the old adage, "The good is often enemy to the better.” And of course the ineffective is always, with all studies, the enemy to the good. So it will pay us to look into this more or less mysterious thing we call Speech, find out how good or poor we are in using it, learn how it works, how to take it apart, and then how to put it together again. We shall discover some rather amazing things about ourselves. We shall be something like the man who was quite astounded to find that he had been using prose all his life; or maybe we shall feel like the novelist Thackeray, who professed to be quite amazed by the discovery that in France even the children spoke French! The least studious and the most easily frightened and the most careless of boys and girls have been using Speech all their lives; they have had thousands of lessons in Speechmost of them good, but very, very many of them quite bad. Now we start afresh. I. THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF SPEECH. A. Speech as a Means of Communication. We live in a world of people, of fellow human beings. To be happy and successful we have to learn how to get on with one another; in countless ways we are dependent upon those around us. We live happily and successfully just in proportion as we learn how to adjust our corners to theirs, to fit our hands in theirs, to go about our work and play with the least possible friction and obstruction. This means that we must know each other's thoughts, each other's feelings, each other's desires, and that we must continually take these into account in our daily lives. How do we do this? How can you and I each know what the other is thinking or feeling or desiring? There is no way of x-raying another person's mental operations. We never do find out directly; we always have to get the secret by roundabout ways; that is, you cannot actually think my thoughts and I cannot actually feel your feelings. Then what do we do? Why, we find them out indirectly. For be sure that we do "carry" thought and feelings to others, else we could not live or grow up or be successful in the struggle of life. How do we do it? We read and interpret the outward signs. When we can look at another person and know what he thinks or feels or wishes, we can better get along with him. When we hear him use his voice and make vocal sounds for us to interpret, then we can get on better still. The answer is, then, that we succeed in living with other people by making and interpreting signs. This is best summed up under the name, COMMUNICATION The most important signs that we can see and hear in the behavior of others are those that we call speech. Everything you can see in the actions of another and everything you can hear in his voice may become a sign or signal of his meaning and thus be included in speech. Speech is communication,it is a key which opens up our minds and hearts one to another. If a man lived in complete isolation from other living beings, he would never need any means of communication and would never learn to speak. He might express his ideas and feelings in some kind of actions and vocal sounds, but these actions and sounds would not be speech. B. Forms of Communication. In order to understand more fully what speech really is, let us consider certain forms of communication and see how they work. What is the problem of communicating by telegraph? Merely this: to devise a code in terms of sound-dots and dashes-which can be sent over the wires. First both individuals doing the communicating agree on the code, then make the sounds, and finally learn to interpret or translate them into written words. In this way they can communicate over the wires. When A who is to send the message, and B who is to receive it, have agreed that giving the right signals, can make B think of a small, furry animal which catches mice and which is more or less of a nuisance around his house. When the football team have learned their signals—a disguised form of speech-the means "c-a-t," then A by quarter back communicates with the members of his team by calling off combinations of numbers to which definite meanings have been attached. If one person agrees with another that every time he bends his little finger he will be thinking "cat," they can communicate with each other in that way, and they will be using a form of speech. Have you ever seen a football team from a deaf and dumb school play a game? They make their signals with their fingers and arms. Yet they are using a form of speech. How many in the class know the boy-scout semaphore signals which make up one code for communication? Speech is the best way human beings have yet invented for communicating one with another. It is essentially a code; it is composed of audible signs made with the vocal muscles and of visible signs made with the other muscles of the body. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. Define speech. 2. In what ways other than speech can people communicate with each other? 3. What likenesses and differences are there among the following: a telegraph message, a telephone conversation, a letter, and a public address? 4. How does the sort of speech used by the deaf and dumb differ from ordinary speech? 5. What advantage have the audible signals over the visible signals in speech? Vice versa? 6. How much communication through speech is possible between people who speak different languages? 7. Do animals speak? What is your own observation on this point? How many modes of communication among animals can you state? 8. Make up a simple set of original signals of some sort which might be used as a means of communication. 9. Say something to the class using the visible signals of speech without the audible signals; use sign language, pantomime. 10. Communicate meaning to someone, using your voice without words. |