11. Give an example from your own observation of the effect of feeling and enthusiasm on listeners.
12. Memorize Carlyle's and Emerson's remarks on enthusiasm.
13. Deliver Patrick Henry's address, page 110, and Thurston's speech, page 50, without show of feeling or enthusiasm. What is the result?
14. Repeat, with all the feeling these selections demand. What is the result?
15. What steps do you intend to take to develop the power of enthusiasm and feeling in speaking?
16. Write and deliver a five-minute speech ridiculing a speaker who uses bombast, pomposity and over-enthusiasm. Imitate him.
Animis opibusque parati--Ready in mind and resources.
In omnibus negotiis prius quam aggrediare, adhibenda est præparatio diligens--In all matters before beginning a diligent preparation should be made.
Take your dictionary and look up the words that contain the Latin stem _flu_--the results will be suggestive.
At first blush it would seem that fluency consists in a ready, easy use of words. Not so--the flowing quality of speech is much more, for it is a composite effect, with each of its prior conditions deserving of careful notice.
Speaking broadly, fluency is almost entirely a matter of preparation. Certainly, native gifts figure largely here, as in every art, but even natural facility is dependent on the very same laws of preparation that hold good for the man of supposedly small native endowment. Let this encourage you if, like Moses, you are prone to complain that you are not a ready speaker.
Have you ever stopped to analyze that expression, "a ready speaker?" Readiness, in its prime sense, is preparedness, and they are most ready who are best prepared. Quick firing depends more on the alert finger than on the hair trigger. Your fluency will be in direct ratio to two important conditions: your knowledge of what you are going to say, and your being accustomed to telling what you know to an audience. This gives us the second great element of fluency--to preparation must be added the ease that arises from practise; of which more presently.
Mr. Bryan is a most fluent speaker when he speaks on political problems, tendencies of the time, and questions of morals. It is to be supposed, however, that he would not be so fluent in speaking on the bird life of the Florida Everglades. Mr. John Burroughs might be at his best on this last subject, yet entirely lost in talking about international law. Do not expect to speak fluently on a subject that you know little or nothing about. Ctesiphon boasted that he could speak all day (a sin in itself) on any subject that an audience would suggest. He was banished by the Spartans.