Oratory for the Amateur.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 12 June 1914, Page 8

Oratory for the Amateur.

A PROFESSIONAL GIVES PRACTICAL POINTERS IN PUBLIC SPEAKING. Can you speak ? I can. At the rate of two hundred words a minute the words shoot out of my mouth like water from a high-pressure fire-engine. How.did I learn to speak like this? By doing the exercises subjoined below. All the best professors of oratory prescribe them to their pupils. If anyone does them conscientiously he will very soon be an expert extemporiser. Exercise No. 1. —Choose a word— any word will do—and then see how many words you can. find that have exactly the same meaning as it has. Take, for example, the word "abandon." It has at least twenty equivalents—" relinquish," " forego," and so on. -Try to find thorn without ••onsnlting the dictionary. liy doing this regularly your working vocabulary will increase amazingly, and you will soon have ten words to choose from for every one you had before. One advantage of this exercise is that you can do it anywhere mentally—in church, in the train, even in bed. An excellent time to do it is when travelling to business in the morning. Your eye catches an advertisement extolling somebody's "choice chocolates." Find other words that will do as well as "choice." "Delicious," "delectable," "toothsome," and so on. The number of words you find, and the speed with which you find them indicate the progress you are making towards the goal of eloquence. After you have done this for a week or two, do the same thing, not with single words, but with whole sentences. You hear someone humming "Everybody's doingit." Change thte to other sentences of the same meaning. You will probably think of something like this : ".It's quite the rage now;" or : "It is practically universal." But there are scores, if not hundreds, of other equivalents. Make as many as you can. After a few weeks of this you will find your power of making sentences increasing in the most amazing way. I.took a young curate in hand some time ago. He w"as a feeble, hesitating speaker, even for a beginner, but after nine/weeks at this exercise he could spout like a cataract in time of flood. Exercise No. 2. —Practise defining words. You see the word " philanthropy" in an article. Define it as briefly and accurately as you can after the fashion of dictionaries. Don't use a dictionary, however. The object of this exercise is to train you in clearness and precision of jspeech—qualities quite as necessary to the public speaker as a copious flow of words. Exercise No. 3. —Practise translation. Take some old-fashioned poet like Milton or Shakespeare, and translate his verses into .>riiiuvry English prose of the present day. Do it aloud, and in the very i cst language you can command at the moment. Better still, if you know any foreign tongue ; turn passages from it into English, putting as much life and expression into your voice as you possibly can. This was the method adopted by some of the great Parliamentary orators of bygone days. One of our most eloquent Prime Ministers used to do it every evening when Parliament was .silting, and to this he attributed his unparalleled fluency. A few months at these exercises will make anybody—unless he be absolutely deal" sr>d dumb —into a fluent and ready speaker. His ordinary conversation, even, will be improved out of all recognition. In my long experience I have never known one case of failure. Try it yourself—if only for a week or two—and you will see.

Dentists rarely use the term "tooth jerker" in speaking of one another ? 3 900.