In conversation you have your best opportunity for developing your public speaking style.  Indeed, you are there, despite yourself, forming habits which will disclose themselves in your public speaking.  As you speak in your daily conversation you will largely speak when you stand before an audience.

You will therefore see the importance of care in your daily speech.  There should be a fastidious choice of words, care in pronunciation and articulation, and the mouth well opened so that the words may come out wholly through the mouth and not partly through the nose.  Culture of conversation is to be recommended for its own sake, since everyone must speak in private if not in public.

One of the best plans for self-culture in speaking is to read aloud for a few minutes every day from a book of well-selected speeches.  There are numerous compilations of the kind admirably suited to this purpose.  The important thing here is to read in speaking style, not in what is termed reading style as usually taught in schools.  When you practise in this way it would be well to imagine an audience before you and to render the speech as if emanating from your own mind.  The student of public speaking will wisely guard himself against acquiring an artificial style or other mannerism.

Another good plan is to make short mental speeches while walking.  When possible it is well to choose a country road for this purpose, or a park, or some other place where one’s mind is not likely to be often diverted by passers-by.  Lord Dufferin, the eminent British orator, was accustomed to prepare most of his speeches while riding on horseback.  The habit of forming mental speeches is a great aid to actual speech-making, as it tends to give the mind a power and an adaptability which it would not otherwise have.

The painter, the musician, the sculptor, the architect, and other craftsmen search out models for study and inspiration.  The public speaker should do likewise, and history shows that the great orators of the world have followed this practise.  You can not do better than take as your model the greatest short speech in all history, the Gettysburg Address.

An authority on English style has critically examined this speech and acknowledges that he cannot suggest a single change in it which would add to its power and perfection.

You recall the circumstances under which it was written.  On the morning of November 18, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was travelling from Washington to take part next day in the consecration of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.  He wrote his speech on a scrap of wrapping-paper, carefully fitting word to word, changing and correcting it in minutest detail as best he could until it was finished.

The next day after the speech had been delivered, Edward Everett, the trained and polished orator, said that he would have been content to have made in his oration of two hours the impression which Lincoln had made in that many minutes.