MAKING SPEECHES

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 16, 19 January 1924, Page 16

MAKING SPEECHES

AUTOMATISM AND. ORATORY

A writer in the "Daily Mail" during the recent election campaign discussed tho "mechanism of speech-making" as the result of a statement by a woman speaker that the first few minutes of one of her speeches • was declared automatically. He showed' that this was quite a general experience: The discourse that has been entirely, memorised can, of course, be left out of consideration, but it must be admitted, he wrote) that a large number of the rhetorical efforts to which we listen are only the partial verbal refraining of ideas which have been carefully stored inconsequence . Where the speech has been written in full this mechanical delivery is still more pronounced, and on this point a famous psychologist has recently cited a curious experience. While he was addressing a' learned ■ society ho was unconscious for,a time what he was saying, like the woman speaker quoted above, but during the .whole- of his speech he could see a picturo of the lines of writing on his manuscript passing before his mind's eye; Even in the impromptu speech-r-^for instance, the j suddenly-called-fdr after-dinner speech—memory plays a large part. For the hastily jotted notes leave behind them in the brain of the preparer a chain of connected ideas. The tyro's effort at speechmaking is' a war between his memory and his observation of the moment Stage fright :s nothing more than the success ot the latter over the former, and automatic speechmaking the complete ', obliteration of his suroundings by the'steady flow of already ordered speech. Once an unpractised speaker begins to interfere with the delivery of his speech we arrive t at a condition which is akin to that which exists in those who stammer. Stammerers can usually talk well enough as long as their attention is not attracted to what they are doing. But once direct their notice to the effort of speech and their uncertain mechanism breaks down. Similarly the neophytic orator's collapse comes from a stammering in the higher centres of the brain, the result of outside objects intruding, upon his consciousness. The veteran of the hustings is always envied for his readiness in dealing with interruptions, or the speed with which he weaves A intercepted word he has acquired is that of shunting his memory for a moment, and then, after having emerged for a time into full consciousness, of being able to turn on the steam of memory where he cut it off.