A nice balance between these two kinds of attention is important.

You can no more escape this law than you can live without air:  Your platform gestures, your voice, your inflection, will all be just as good as your habit of gesture, voice, and inflection makes them—­no better.  Even the thought of whether you are speaking fluently or not will have the effect of marring your flow of speech.

Return to the opening chapter, on self-confidence, and again lay its precepts to heart.  Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules.  It is not—­or ought not to be—­necessary for you to stop to think how to say the alphabet correctly, as a matter of fact it is slightly more difficult for you to repeat Z, Y, X than it is to say X, Y, Z—­habit has established the order.  Just so you must master the laws of efficiency in speaking until it is a second nature for you to speak correctly rather than otherwise.  A beginner at the piano has a great deal of trouble with the mechanics of playing, but as time goes on his fingers become trained and almost instinctively wander over the keys correctly.  As an inexperienced speaker you will find a great deal of difficulty at first in putting principles into practise, for you will be scared, like the young swimmer, and make some crude strokes, but if you persevere you will “win out.”

Thus, to sum up, the vocabulary you have enlarged by study,[4] the ease in speaking you have developed by practise, the economy of your well-studied emphasis all will subconsciously come to your aid on the platform.  Then the habits you have formed will be earning you a splendid dividend.  The fluency of your speech will be at the speed of flow your practise has made habitual.

But this means work.  What good habit does not?  No philosopher’s stone that will act as a substitute for laborious practise has ever been found.  If it were, it would be thrown away, because it would kill our greatest joy—­the delight of acquisition.  If public-speaking means to you a fuller life, you will know no greater happiness than a well-spoken speech.  The time you have spent in gathering ideas and in private practise of speaking you will find amply rewarded.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1.  What advantages has the fluent speaker over the hesitating talker?

2.  What influences, within and without the man himself, work against fluency?

3.  Select from the daily paper some topic for an address and make a three-minute address on it.  Do your words come freely and your sentences flow out rhythmically?  Practise on the same topic until they do.

4.  Select some subject with which you are familiar and test your fluency by speaking extemporaneously.

5.  Take one of the sentiments given below and, following the advice given on pages 118-119, construct a short speech beginning with the last word in the sentence.