Then how can the various types of speaking be practiced so as to make best use of the mode drawn from conversation? How is the conversational mode to be used as the basis of instruction and how is it to be woven into the many possible situations where speech is employed?

THE STANDARD OF DIRECTNESS

"Naturalness"; "Directness"; "Be Natural."-An answer sometimes used is, "Be natural." Another is, "Be direct." Yet neither of these, though helpful, carries its own explanation. A critic can listen to a speaker's or a reader's loud noise or strident pitch and call it "unnatural," averring that no proper person ever talks that way. Yet if the words used indicate anger, then the "natural" way of uttering them to carry the suggestion of that anger is surely not the way of dry exposition nor of soft conciliation. So also with words. that indicate fear, grief, love, hate, and all the other more intense emotions; they need intense manners of speech. The really "natural" way to express them is the way a man would speak if he were naïvely dominated by fear, grief, love, or hate; he would then gibber, wail, coo, or snarl. When we speak of "natural" conversation, we mean a kind of conversation untrammeled by the presence of an audience or a critic or of any desire other than that of getting the listener to understand and react.

There is no aid given by urging pupils to be "natural." Most of them naturally speak very ill indeed when natural. Naturally they are afraid; they quite naturally get stiff, become overtense, lose their wits, or else are quite as naturally too secure, too glib, too florid, or too flamboyant. They are by nature what their early training has made them, and early training has made most of them inefficient, indirect, oversensitive, flighty, halting, or dull.

WHAT IT IS TO BE "NATURAL"

So what is meant by the advice, "Be natural"? Surely it cannot mean that a student is to be what he always has been; otherwise there would be little wisdom in taking a course in speaking. Obviously he is not studying this sub

ject just to confirm himself more deeply in the weaknesses he is trying to overcome. To be natural is not at all synonymous with being what he always has been.

Here are some understandable qualities of being natural: 1. Be unaffected; use a minimum of display; show off only enough to reveal power; make the exhibitory factors of speaking thoroughly secondary to the communicative factors. 2. Be normally vigorous; speak as you do when you are in earnest anywhere, earnest enough to convince people that you mean what you say.

3. Seem to be at home; speak as you speak freely among those you know and trust. Be as unconstrained and as free from nervousness as among your own people.

4. Be your best: eliminate awkwardness, dullness, and inefficiency. Be what you believe your most interesting self to be.

5. Be free from stiffness, equally tight or loose all over; not stiff in the neck and limp in the knees nor stiff in the knees and limp in the neck.

6. Be simple; beware of undue exaggeration. Don't be highflown, pompous, puffed-up.

7. Be forthright; connect straightaway with your hearers; count yourself one of them.

8. Be communicative; cultivate what has been called "a lively sense of communication."

"Directness."-In a similar manner, to say that speaking should always be "direct" leaves something yet to be explained. In the first place, the quality "directness" is not appropriate to all speaking, in the sense of colloquial, easy, unstrained, informal, unadorned talk. Large occasions and urgent issues set the speaker apart from his hearers, above them, on a higher level. At such times colloquial ease can be the one manner most inappropriate. Informality can at times invite failure. Yet in all speech which judicious men hear gladly there is present some of this thing called directness. It comes back to the quality we call communicativeness, enough of an everyday manner so that hearers schooled chiefly to conversation can apprehend and retain the meaning intended. The term is best used as placing a just

emphasis upon the qualities of ease and simplicity, two virtues that most young speakers need to cultivate.

Familiarity Aids Directness.-Another way of clarifying the notion of "directness" is to point out that it is almost always present when people are talking "shop." When men get together to talk about the affairs that concern their daily work, they are almost invariably free, easy, uninhibited, and communicative; they are "direct." More particularly does this mode reveal itself when the talkers know one another thoroughly and are not afraid of committing a faux pas when they essay to speak. Again, we get good specimens of this standard when any expert talks on his hobby or specialty. His subject matter is so familiar to him and he is. so little afraid of making himself ridiculous to his hearers that he speaks right out in a manner distinctly communicative; it reaches his hearers and does that to them which he wishes it to do. Observation of speakers talking under such conditions will bring much illumination as to the meaning and nature of "directness."

Convincingness.-A better counsel than "Be natural" is "Be convincing." We have seen that it is not wise to advise learners to be natural; they are too naturally awkward, or naturally indistinct, or fumbling, or flighty. However, a standard can be set that is always applicable, if they are urged to make themselves believed. Note the expression "make themselves believed": not merely their ideas and their purposes, but themselves. One may go before an audience and be awkward, and be believed; one may use a strident voice and awkward bodily movements and still be believed. On the other hand, one may have the most melodious of voices, the most graceful of gestures, the choicest of language, or ideas seemingly wonderful, but still be mistrusted. Probably most people when they say "Be natural," mean "Be convincing." They would say: Find the method of making people believe in you. So as a standard throughout this book we shall set the following: Be understood; make yourself acceptable; be more than plausible; be convincing; make yourself believed.

EXHIBITION VS. COMMUNICATION

A Highly Exhibitory Manner Injures Communicativeness. -A negative way of getting at this problem of a good communicative manner is to take note of its opposite. This opposite is best termed exhibition. Stage speech, always highly exhibitory, is not good before a committee or a board of directors, nor is the "ministerial tone" effective before a college faculty. Why? Because such situations call for communication aplenty and for display hardly at all, whereas stage manners and pulpit mannerisms are for show, for purposes of exhibition. The actor uses an exhibitory manner because his art compels him to; the preacher who commits the specific nuisance called the "ministerial tone" really seems to do it from choice, consciously or subconsciously made. That he is not compelled to take up with this manner is demonstrated by the experience of hosts of his brethren who prove to be successful and yet are clearly communicative. Obviously the intoning, chanting preacher intones and chants to add an effect not to be achieved by directnessa touch of the dramatic. So also the campaign spellbinder; he is on parade, a part of an exhibition of histrionics; he does not reveal that is, the real campaign "tail twister" does not a sincere mind honestly trying to carry frank ideas to other minds eager to learn and hear them.

Any exhibitory manner, when applied to public address or to plain speaking, can be described as a way of failing to make communication the chief aim of the speech. What remnants of a conversational mode are left in such styles are likely to be those of a tragedian, a paranoiac, a dandy, or a simpleton. Such manners belong only to exhibitory occasions-impersonations, acting, and attempts to hocus-pocus a gullible public-situations where communication is at its lowest level and where fair conversation is not a part of the game. Their most dangerous exemplar is the streetcorner exhorter selling patent medicines: part show and part trickery. Many of the ills of public address as we encounter it can be remedied by a better balance between the exhibitory and the communicative.

Public Speaking Today.-Another way of expressing the need for communicativeness and directness is to urge the need for getting contact with the audience. In the days of Daniel Webster, the epoch of the "grand style" in oratory, there was a mood upon the speakers of the time making them remote from their audiences. The lithographs of Webster, Clay, Calhoun and other orators of the period suggest men who are high above their fellows, men who find it easy to stand on a pedestal. Their very portraits make them appear to be leaning away from something. Read the written words of their speeches and you get the impression again. They were remote mountain peaks, far above the common ways of men. Wendell Phillips changed all that by showing the nation how a public speaker can combine dignified language, lofty ideals, and splendid oratorical powers with simplicity and directness. Phillips was always direct. As George William Curtis said of him, he was a "gentleman conversing." Yet he wielded all the power and grandeur of the exponents of the "grand manner." He did it by establishlishing plain human contact with his audience.

Today the style of Wendell Phillips is honored above the style of his predecessors. Speakers aim to cultivate the manner that draws them and the audience closer and closer as the speech progresses. The best of orators today try to make the audience feel that speaker and audience are one, that they are working on a common enterprise, and that as human beings they are on the same level. The "grand style" aimed to widen the breach between speaker and audience, lifting the orator to great heights as a person and leaving the audience down in a valley. The speaker today who can. get close contact with his audience, whether on an informal occasion in a small group, or whether on some momentous matter dealing with the affairs of state and of national destinies or in matters of daily life, is the man best fitted to address audiences as they are found today.

II. COMMUNICATION AS CARRYING THOUGHT The foregoing description has been largely negative, what not to do. Let us be more constructive. To do so calls for