In adapting discourse to audience you must have a supple and attentive mind and an impressionable and swiftly responsive temperament as well as a wide, accurate, and flexible vocabulary.  Unless you are a fool, a zealot, or an incorrigible adventurer, you will not broach a subject at all to which your hearers feel absolute indifference or hostility.  Normally you should pick a subject capable of interesting them.  In presenting it you should pay heed to both your matter and your manner.  You should emphasize for your listeners those aspects of the subject which they will most respond to or most need to hear, whether or not the phases be such as you would emphasize with other auditors.  You should also speak in the fashion you deem most effective with them, whether or not it be one to which your own natural instincts prompt you.

Let us say you are discussing conditions in Europe.  You must speak in one way to the man who has traveled and in an entirely different way to the man who has never gone abroad—­in one way to the well-read man, in an entirely different way to the ignoramus.  Let us say you are discussing urban life, urban problems.  You must speak in one way to the man who lives in the city, in another to the man who lives in the country.  Let us say you are discussing the labor problem.  You must speak in one way to employers, in another to employees, possibly in a third to men thrown out of jobs, possibly in a fourth to the general public.  Let us say you are discussing education, or literature, or social tendencies, or mechanical principles or processes, or some great enterprise or movement.  You must speak in one way to cultivated hearers and in another to men in the street, and if you are a specialist addressing specialists, you will cut the garment of your discourse to their particular measure.

The same principle holds regardless of whether you expound, analyze, argue, recount, or describe.  You must always keep a finger on the mental or emotional pulse of those whom you address.  But your problem varies slightly with the form of discourse you adopt.  In explanation, analysis, and argument the chief barriers you encounter are likely to be those of the mind; you must make due allowance for the intellectual limitations of your auditors, though many who have capacity enough may for some cause or other be unreceptive to ideas.  In description you must reckon with the imaginative faculty, with the possibility that your hearers cannot visualize what you tell them—­and you must make your words brief.  In narration you must vivify emotional torpor; but lest in your efforts to inveigle boredom you yourself should induce it, you must have a wary eye for signals of distress.

EXERCISE — Adapting

1.  Explain to (a) a rich man, (b) a poor man the blessings of poverty.

2.  Discuss before (a) farmers, (b) merchants the idea that farmers (merchants) make a great deal of money.