Speaking upon Special Occasions.  Every American may be called upon to speak upon some special occasion.  If he does well at his first appearance he may be invited or required by circumstances to speak upon many occasions.  The person who can interest audiences by effective delivery of suitable material fittingly adapted to the particular occasion is always in demand.  Within the narrower confines of educational institutions the opportunities for the student to appear before his schoolmates are as numerous as in real life.  Some preliminary knowledge coupled with much practice will produce deep satisfaction upon successful achievement and result in rapid steps of self-development.

Without pretending to provide for all possible circumstances in which students and others may be called upon to speak, this chapter will list some of the special occasions for which speeches should be prepared.

Speeches of Presiding Officers.  On practically all occasions there is a presiding officer whose chief duty is to introduce to the audience the various speakers.  The one great fault of speeches of introduction is that they are too long.  The introducer sincerely means not to consume too much time, but in the endeavor to do justice to the occasion or the speaker he becomes involved in his remarks until they wander far from his definite purpose.  He wearies the audience before the important speaker begins.  An introducer should not become so unconscious of his real task as to fall into this error.  In other cases the fault is not so innocent.  Many a person called upon to introduce a speaker takes advantage of the chance to express his own opinions.  He drops into the discourtesy of using for his own ends a condition of passive attention which was not created for him.  One large audience which had assembled to hear a lecturer was kept from listening to him while for twenty minutes the introducer aired his own pet theories.  Of course members of the audience discussed among themselves the inappropriateness of such remarks, but it is doubtful whether any criticism reached the offender.

A newspaper recently had the courage to voice the feelings of audiences.

It seems that a good deal of the time of the audience at the Coliseum the other night was taken by those who introduced the speakers of the evening.  We are told in one account of the meeting that the audience was at times impatient of these preliminaries and even howled once or twice for those it had come to hear....  We are informed that all those introducing the speakers said something about not having risen to speak at length, and that one of them protested his inability to speak with any facility.  Both these professions are characteristic of those introducing speakers of the evening.  Yet, strangely enough, the same always happens.  That is, the preliminaries wear the audience out before the people it came to hear can get at it.

In introducing a speaker never be too long-winded.