vincing. One may be much interested in a family of puppies, or in a story about the sagacity of a mother-dog; he may understand perfectly the peculiarities of the different kinds of dogs and know how to train them; yet he may be opposed to keeping a dog, perhaps because he is afraid of rabies. If you want to sell this person a dog, you must convince him that cases of rabies are very few in comparison to the number of dogs living, that rabies and the danger from rabies are lessening, that the particular breed of dog you wish him to buy has never been known to have rabies, etc., etc.

It need hardly be said that clearness in your argument is absolutely essential. Your customer will not believe, will not even listen to what he cannot understand. Likewise you are much more likely to convince him that his fear of rabies is unwarranted if he is interested in what you say to him. So that all three kinds of appeal may properly and profitably be combined.

184. To induce action.1 This is the purpose of persuasion. To induce action is a step farther than to convince. If you would have the person you are talking to do what you want him to, you must appeal to his will. He may enjoy what you say, he may understand every word, he may believe what you tell him, and yet he may not do what you want him to do. Most people who hear Billy Sunday enjoy him, they understand all he

1 This subject is discussed at length in Chapter 5ff. of Effective Speaking, by A. E. Phillips (The Newton Co.), to which the student is referred.

says, they may be convinced that what he says is true; but if the evangelist appealed to his audiences in no other way than these, his converts would be few. For example he not only makes clear that drinking is an evil and convinces his listeners that it is wrong; he touches their hearts and induces them to give, up drinking and vote and work against liquor selling.

THE SUBJECT

185. Choosing a subject. The choice of subject is governed by three things:

1. The audience-its capabilities and attitude. 2. The occasion and purpose of the speech. 3. The capability of the speaker and his knowledge of his subject.

186. The audience. There are many different kinds of audiences. It is easier to find a subject on which to speak to a class than to find one on which to speak to the whole school or to a commencement crowd of people of various ages. For example a class of high-school seniors studying Burke's Speech on Conciliation would listen. with understanding and interest to an account of the effect of the speech on American colonists. The whole school might not be able to appreciate it; the larger audience would have little interest in it. A speaker should study his audience and try to choose a subject which it will understand and be interested in.

187. The occasion helps in the choice of subject. A school recitation, a class dinner, a prayer

meeting, a school assembly, a board of education meeting, each needs a different sort of subject. What would make a hit at a class dinner would hardly be suitable for a Y. M. C. A. prayer meeting. Even if the same general subject were selected, the purpose of the speech would require a different theme in each case. For example, if dancing be the general topic, the classroom discussion might be of the early purpose and style of dancing as one of the fine arts; the school assembly might be interested in a proposal to introduce instruction in folk dancing; at the class dinner might properly be discussed the desirability of having a class dance; in a prayer meeting the moral effects of dancing in the community might be considered; to the board of education an appeal might be made for the use of one of the rooms in the school house for a dancing class or a school dance.

188. The speaker's capability and knowledge should have considerable weight in determining his subject. Theoretically one speaks to any audience because he knows more about the subject than the audience does. That is literally so in actual life; it should be as far as possible so in the practice work of learning to speak. To be effective a speaker should understand his subject thoroughly, he should be interested in it, and he should be convinced that his attitude toward it is the right one. Any evidence of ignorance, of indifference, of uncertainty that appears in his speech will lessen its effectiveness.

Every speaker will do well to spend considerable time in selecting the subject on which he is to speak. He will save time in this way.

HOW TO PREPARE A SPEECH

189. Kinds of speeches. In school practice there are two kinds of speeches,-(1) the memorized selection, and (2) the original speech.

190. 1. The memorized speech is usually a declamation, a recitation, or a piece of memory work. The usual way to memorize a selection is to say the words over and over until they can be repeated without reference or prompting. This is bad practice. Such preparation begins at the wrong end of the task.

191. How to memorize. Ordinarily such preparation gets little farther than the words themselves. A better preparation for a memorized selection is, first, to read it over to get its general meaning; second, to study the meaning of each paragraph and its relation to the whole selection; then study the meaning of each sentence in each paragraph and its relation to other sentences in the paragraph.

192. First practice. Having done this, a student can readily make an outline or brief of the whole selection. Let him then attempt to speak the selection in his own words; he will find ordinarily that the words he uses are very nearly those of the original. If it is important (as in poetry) that the exact words of the original be

used, he will have little trouble in committing them to memory to use in saying the thoughts he has memorized.

193. Thought and speaking. Any exercise which allows pupils merely to pronounce words in a mechanical, heedless way is not only valueless, but is positively harmful. From the first the pupil should be taught to think the thoughts of the writer and to express those thoughts in the way natural to the pupil, that is, the way in which he would have said them if they had been original with him. The greatest faults in speaking memorized selections do not usually come from faulty enunciation and pronunciation, but from failure to understand the thoughts read.

194. The speaker's attitude. In preparatory practice the speaker should try to consider himself as the originator of what he is saying and should put himself in the place of the originator. For example if a girl is reciting a speech of Rosalind's from As You Like It, she should try to sound like Rosalind, act like Rosalind, be Rosalind. A boy declaiming a part of the Conciliation Speech should try to be Burke, and to imagine himself speaking to Parliament. In either case the student must be alive to the meaning of what is said, to the circumstances in which it is said, to the people to whom it is said, and should try to make all these evident to the audience.

195. Choosing speeches. Here again the nature of the selection is important. It is better that a boy should speak the kind of declamation that will