1.  Does it show clearly its intention?

2.  How long will the speech be?

3.  Too long?  Too short?

4.  For what kind of audience is it intended?

5.  Has it unity?

6.  Has it coherence?

7.  Where are transitions most clearly needed?

8.  What suggestions would you make for rearranging any parts?

9.  What reasons have you for these changes?

10.  Is proper emphasis secured?

CHAPTER VIII

MAKING THE OUTLINE OR BRIEF

Orderly Arrangement.  A speech should have an orderly arrangement.  The effect upon an audience will be more easily made, more deeply impressed, more clearly retained, if the successive steps of the development are so well marked, so plainly related, that they may be carried away in a hearer’s understanding.  It might be said that one test of a good speech is the vividness with which its framework is discernible.  Hearers can repeat outlines of certain speeches.  Those are the best.  Of others they can give merely confused reports.  These are the badly constructed ones.

The way to secure in the delivered speech this delight of orderly arrangement is by making an outline or brief.  Most pupils hate to make outlines.  The reason for this repugnance is easily understood.  A teacher directs a pupil to make an outline before he writes a composition or delivers a speech.  The pupil spends hours on the list of entries, then submits his finished theme or address.  He feels that the outline is disregarded entirely.  Sometimes he is not even required to hand it to the instructor.  He considers the time he has spent upon the outline as wasted.  It is almost impossible to make him feel that his finished product is all the better because of this effort spent upon the preliminary skeleton, so that in reality his outline is not disregarded at all, but is judged and marked as embodied in the finished article.  Most students carry this mistaken feeling about outlines to such an extent that when required to hand in both an outline and a finished composition they will write in haphazard fashion the composition first, and then from it try to prepare the outline, instead of doing as they are told, and making the outline first.  It is easier—­though not as educating or productive of good results—­to string words together than it is to do what outline-making demands—­to think.

Professional Writers’ Use of Outlines.  Professional writers realize the helpfulness of outline-making and the time it saves.  Many a magazine article has been sold before a word of the finished manuscript was written.  The contributor submitted an outline from which the editor contracted for the finished production.  Many a play has been placed in the same form.  Books are built up in the same manner.  The ubiquitous moving-picture scenario is seldom produced in any other manner.