cover the water with a flat plate or piston, which fits the
interior of the cylinder perfectly; then apply heat to the
water, and we shall witness the following phenomena. After the
lapse of some minutes the water will begin to boil, and the
steam accumulating at the upper surface will make room for
itself by raising the piston slightly. As the boiling continues,
more and more steam will be formed, and raise the piston higher
and higher, till all the water is boiled away, and nothing but
steam is left in the cylinder. Now this machine, consisting of
"1_1_20">CHAPTER XIX. INFLUENCING BY EXPOSITION 118
The Art of Public Speaking
cylinder, piston, water, and fire, is the steam-engine in its
most elementary form. For a steam-engine may be defined as an
apparatus for doing work by means of heat applied to water; and
since raising such a weight as the piston is a form of doing
work, this apparatus, clumsy and inconvenient though it may be,
answers the definition precisely.[17]
Reference to Experience is one of the most vital principles in exposition--as in every other form of
discourse.
"Reference to experience, as here used, means reference to the known. The known is that which the listener
has seen, heard, read, felt, believed or done, and which still exists in his consciousness--his stock of
knowledge. It embraces all those thoughts, feelings and happenings which are to him real. Reference to
Experience, then, means coming into the listener's life.[18]
The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical
faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are
practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest affairs
of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the
marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that
by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from
fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and
deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind
upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand
thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and
Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact,
simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all
habitually, and at every moment, use carelessly.
--THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, Lay Sermons.
Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are
written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a
moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a
decreasing leg? an increasing belly? is not your voice broken?
your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every
part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call
yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!
--SHAKESPEARE, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Finally, in preparing expository material ask yourself these questions regarding your subject:
What is it, and what is it not? What is it like, and unlike? What are its causes, and effects? How shall it be
divided? With what subjects is it correlated? What experiences does it recall? What examples illustrate it?
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. What would be the effect of adhering to any one of the forms of discourse in a public address?
2. Have you ever heard such an address?
"1_1_20">CHAPTER XIX. INFLUENCING BY EXPOSITION 119
The Art of Public Speaking
3. Invent a series of examples illustrative of the distinctions made on pages 232 and 233.
4. Make a list of ten subjects that might be treated largely, if not entirely, by exposition.
5. Name the six standards by which expository writing should be tried.
6. Define any one of the following: (a) storage battery; ( b) "a free hand;" (c) sail boat; (d) "The Big Stick;"
(e) nonsense; (f) "a good sport;" (g) short-story; (h) novel; (i) newspaper; (j) politician; (k ) jealousy; (l) truth;
(m) matinee girl; (n) college honor system; (o) modish; (p) slum; (q) settlement work; (r) forensic.
7. Amplify the definition by antithesis.
8. Invent two examples to illustrate the definition (question 6).
9. Invent two analogies for the same subject (question 6).
10. Make a short speech based on one of the following: (a) wages and salary; (b) master and man; (c) war and
peace; (d) home and the boarding house; (e) struggle and victory; (f) ignorance and ambition.
11. Make a ten-minute speech on any of the topics named in question 6, using all the methods of exposition
already named.
12. Explain what is meant by discarding topics collateral and subordinate to a subject.
13. Rewrite the jury-speech on page 224.
14. Define correlation.
15. Write an example of "classification," on any political, social, economic, or moral issue of the day.
16. Make a brief analytical statement of Henry W. Grady's "The Race Problem," page 36.
17. By what analytical principle did you proceed? (See page 225.)
18. Write a short, carefully generalized speech from a large amount of data on one of the following subjects:
(a) The servant girl problem; (b) cats; (c) the baseball craze; (d) reform administrations; (e) sewing societies;
(f) coeducation; (g) the traveling salesman.
19. Observe this passage from Newton's "Effective Speaking:"
"That man is a cynic. He sees goodness nowhere. He sneers at
virtue, sneers at love; to him the maiden plighting her troth is
an artful schemer, and he sees even in the mother's kiss nothing
but an empty conventionality."
Write, commit and deliver two similar passages based on your choice from this list: (a) "the egotist;" (b) "the
sensualist;" (c) "the hypocrite;" (d) "the timid man;" (e) "the joker;" (f) "the flirt;" (g) "the ungrateful woman;"
( h) "the mournful man." In both cases use the principle of "Reference to Experience."
20. Write a passage on any of the foregoing characters in imitation of the style of Shakespeare's
characterization of Sir John Falstaff, page 227.
"1_1_20">CHAPTER XIX. INFLUENCING BY EXPOSITION 120
The Art of Public Speaking
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Argumentation will be outlined fully in subsequent chapter.]
[Footnote 13: The Working Principles of Rhetoric, J.F. Genung.]
[Footnote 14: How to Attract and Hold an Audience, J. Berg Esenwein.]
[Footnote 15: On the various types of definition see any college manual of Rhetoric.]
[Footnote 16: Quoted in The Working Principles of Rhetoric, J.F. Genung.]
[Footnote 16A: Quoted in The Working Principles of Rhetoric, J.F. Genung.]
[Footnote 17: G.C.V. Holmes, quoted in Specimens of Exposition, H. Lamont.]
[Footnote 18: Effective Speaking, Arthur Edward Phillips. This work covers the preparation of public speech
in a very helpful way.]
"1_1_21">CHAPTER XX. INFLUENCING BY DESCRIPTION
The groves of Eden vanish'd now so long,
Live in description, and look green in song.
--ALEXANDER POPE, Windsor Forest.
The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar
facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it
clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he
watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a
material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind,
contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment
of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the
blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It
is proper creation. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]