The Art of Lecturing Part 3

Most mannerisms are undesirable and very few have any value. As they are usually formed early, one should look out for them at the outset and nip them in the bud, before they have a chance to become fixed habits.

I often notice myself running my fingers through my hair about the opening sentence, as though I could thereby loosen up my brain.

Debs speaks a good deal doubled up like the corner of a square--a mannerism that probably has its origin, partly in a body weary from overwork, and partly from a desire to get closer to the auditors on the main floor.

Mannerisms of matter are very common and many speakers seem to take no trouble to avoid them.

Many speakers become so addicted to certain hackneyed phrases that those used to hearing them speak can see them coming sentences away. One of the hardest ridden of these is, "along those lines." I have heard speakers overwork that sentence until I never hear it without a shudder and if I used it myself it would be to refer to car lines, and even then I should prefer "those tracks."

G. W. Woodbey, our colored speaker of "what to do and how to do it"

fame, never speaks an hour without asking at least thirty times, "Do you understand?" but the inimitable manner in which he pokes his chin forward as he does so usually convulses his audience and makes a virtue of what would otherwise be a defect. The veteran speaker Barney Berlyn says, every little while, "you understand," but he is so terribly in earnest, and so forceful in his style, that no one but a cold blooded critic would ever notice it.

Another speaker I know in the west, asks his audience about every ten minutes, "Do you get my point?" This is very irritating, as it is really a constant questioning of the audience's ability to see what he is driving at. It would be much better to say, "Do I make myself understood?" and put the blame for possible failure where it usually belongs. If an audience fails to "get the point" it is because the speaker failed to put it clearly.

A terribly overworked word is "proposition." It is a good word, but that is no reason why it should be treated like a pack mule.

Hackneyed words and phrases are due to laziness in construction and a limited vocabulary.

The remedy is to take pains in forming sentences, practice different ways of stating the same thing, increase your stock of words by "looking up" every new one.

The lecturer should always have a good dictionary within reach, especially when reading, if he has to borrow the money to buy it.

CHAPTER XII

COURSE LECTURING--NO CHAIRMAN

The very first essential to successful course lecturing is--no chairman.

On three different occasions I have tried to deliver a long course of lectures with a chairman, as a concession to comrades who disagreed with me. One learns by experience, however, and I shall never repeat the experiment.

Anyone who suggested that university course lectures should have a presiding chairman would get no serious hearing. All the course lecturers now before the public dispense with chairmen. It is a case of survival of the fittest; the course lecturers who had chairmen didn't know their business and they disappeared. This does not apply to a series of three or four lectures, for in that case when the speaker has become familiar with his audience, and the chairman should be dispensed with, his work is done and a new speaker appears who needs to be introduced.

Course lecturing is by far the most difficult of all forms of lecturing.

The beginner will not, of course, attempt it. There are shoals of speakers of over five years' experience who are not capable of more than two lectures; many of the best are exhausted by half a dozen. A course of thirty to fifty is a gigantic task, and no one who realizes how great it is will throw a straw in the lecturer's way. To insist on his having a chairman could hardly be called a straw; it would more nearly approach a stick of dynamite.

I take up this question because it is certain that this method of lecturing will increase among Socialists in the future and we should learn to avoid sources of disaster.

Now, I will give reasons. First, in course lectures the chairman has no functions; he is entirely superfluous. There are no points of order or procedure to be decided, and the speaker does not need to be introduced.

There are notices to be announced, but these are better left with the lecturer for many reasons. They give him a chance to clear his throat, find the proper pitch of his voice, and get into communication with his audience; then, when he begins his lecture he can do his best from the very first word.

If the lecturer knows that the entire program is in his own hands he is saved a great deal of irritation and nervousness. How well I remember those little disputes with the chair when I knew the meeting was lagging late and the chairman insisted we should wait until a few more came.

The speaker's request for a good collection will usually bring from twenty to forty per cent better results than if it came from a chairman.

In announcing the next lecture the speaker is usually able, by telling what ground he will cover, etc., to arouse the interest of the audience so that they make up their minds to attend.

Poor chairmen blunder along and make bad "breaks" which irritate both audience and speaker, while good chairmen feel they are doing nothing that could not be better done by the speaker and, that they are really only in his way.

I have only met two kinds of men who insist that the course lecturer should be handicapped with a chairman; those who say it gives him too much power--an argument that belongs to the sucking bottle stage of our movement--and those who enjoy acting as chairman.

I should be slow to mention the latter, but alas! my own experience so conclusively proves it, and the peculiarity of human nature, in or out of our movement is, that it is wonderfully human.

There are very few of us who do not enjoy sitting in plain view of a large audience and, when any good purpose is to be served, it is a very laudable ambition.

But if we have no better end to gain than standing between a speaker and his audience and, though with the best intentions in the world, adding to the difficulties of a task that is already greater than most of us would care to face, for the sake of our great cause, and that it may be the more ably defended, let us refrain.

CHAPTER XIII

COURSE LECTURING--LEARN TO CLa.s.sIFY

The definition of science as "knowledge cla.s.sified," while leaving much to be said, is perhaps, as satisfactory as any that could be condensed into two words.

A trained capacity for cla.s.sification is wholly indispensable in a course lecturer. We all know the speaker who announces his subject and then rambles off all over the universe. With this speaker, everybody knows that, no matter what the subject or the occasion of the meeting, it is going to be the same old talk that has done duty, how long n.o.body can remember.

If, under the head of "surplus value" you talk twenty minutes about prohibition, how will you avoid repet.i.tion when you come to speak on the temperance question?

The surest way to acquire this qualification is to study the sciences.

The dazzling array of facts which science has acc.u.mulated, owe half their value to the systematization they have received at the hands of her greatest savants.

It is impossible to take a step in scientific study without coming face to face with her grand cla.s.sifications. At the very beginning science divides the universe into two parts, the inorganic and the organic. The inorganic is studied under the head of "physics"; the organic, under "biology."

Physics (not the kind one throws to the dogs, of course) is then subdivided into Astronomy, Chemistry, and Geology, while Biology has its two great divisions, Zoology (animals) and Botany (plants), all these having subdivisions reaching into every ramification of the material universe, which is the real subject matter of science, being as it is the only thing about which we possess any "knowledge."

Another way of learning to cla.s.sify is to select a subject and then "read it up." Here is a good method:

Take a ten-cent copy book, the usual size about eight by six inches and begin on the first inside page. Write on the top of the page, left side, a good subject, leaving that page and the one opposite to be used for that question. Turn over and do the same again on the next page with some other subject. This practice of selecting subjects, in itself, will be valuable training.

In the search for subjects take any good lecture syllabus and select those about which you have a fair general idea. You will soon learn to frame some of your own. Good examples of standard questions are "Free Will," "Natural Selection," "Natural Rights," "Economic Determinism,"

"Mutation," "Individualism," and a host of others, all of which have a distinct position in thought, and about which there is a standard literature.

Then, in your general reading, whenever you come across anything of value in any book, on any of your listed subjects, turn to the page in your copy book and enter it up, author, volume, chapter and page. When you come to lecture on that question, there it will be, or, at least, you will know just where it is.

Of course, the two pages devoted to "Natural Rights" would mention, among other references, Prof. David G. Ritchie's book on "Natural Rights"; and the eighth essay of Huxley's First Volume of "Collected Essays," in which he annihilates Henry George.

All this means an immense quant.i.ty of reading, but unless you have carefully read and weighed about all the best that has been said on any question, your own opinions will have no value, and it is simply presumption to waste the time of an audience doling out a conception that, for aught you know, may have been knocked in the head half a century ago.

What can be more tiresome than the prattle about "absolute justice,"

"eternal truth," "inalienable rights," "the ident.i.ty of the ethics of Christianity with those of Socialism," and a lot of other theories, which lost their footing in scientific literature and transmigrated to begin a new career among the uninformed, sixty years ago.

Of course, some of these positions look all right to you now, but when you learn what has been revealed about them by the science and philosophy of the last six decades, they will seem about as rational as the doctrine of a personal devil or the theory of a flat earth.