The Art of Lecturing Part 5

I will now give my latest method of note taking--the product of years of experience and many long hours of careful planning. It works so simply and perfectly that I do not see how it can be further improved. This confidence in the perfection of my methods is not usual with me. I have tried every method I could hear of or scheme out, and this is the only one that ever gave satisfaction. Now for the method.

Have a table on the platform. Never allow the chairman to open the debate until your table and chair have been provided. Next, a good supply of loose pages of blank white paper of reasonably good quality and fairly smooth surface. A good size is nine inches long and six wide.

Any wholesale paper house will cut them for you. Remember, they must be loose; do not try to use a note book. Next, a good lead pencil, writing blue at one end and red at the other.

When your opponent makes his first point make a note of it in blue at the top of one of your loose pages. There is no need of numbering any of the pages. Keep that page exclusively for that one point. Leave the upper half of the page for the note of his point. If you have your answer ready, make a note of it half way down the page in red.

This will leave a s.p.a.ce under both the blue note of your opponent's point and the red note of your reply. In the upper s.p.a.ce you may enter fuller detail of his point if you think best. In the bottom s.p.a.ce you may amplify your reply or strike out your first idea of reply and enter one that seems stronger.

The immense advantage of this one-point-one-page system is that in arranging the order of reply you need only arrange the pages. The position of any point may be changed by moving the page dealing with it.

When you have completed a page by entering the blue note and the red reply and you feel that you have that item well in hand, lay that page aside and work on the completion of others. When your opponent is about half through his speech you should have about half a dozen pages completed and you should begin to put them in the order in which they are to be used.

A good strong point should be selected to open. Lay this page face downward on your table, away from the rest of your papers, where it will stand forth clearly and not cause you to hunt around the table when the chairman calls you. Lay the second point page on top of it, face down, of course. When you have a pile like this, by turning it over and laying it before you face up, you are ready to begin. You can rearrange the order of these pages from time to time during the latter part of your opponent's speech.

Whenever you find your opponent developing a point you have already grasped and noted, you may take time to go over the pile of completed pages. In this overhauling process you will find some faulty pages. If you have noted a weak point of your opponent's and it does not admit of a strong, clear reply, take it out of your pile and place it separately so that it may be returned if you can improve it sufficiently, or finally rejected and left unused if you cannot.

By the time your opponent is about to close you should have about twice as many pages as you can use in the time allowed you and they should be rapidly but carefully sifted. Anything that looks vague or weak should be thrust aside. If need be, it is better to spend extra time on some strong position which is fundamental to the debate.

To make a good debate you must meet your opponent most fully on his strongest ground. Any tricky evasion of his strong points and enlarging of minor issues is disgraceful to you and insulting to the audience. It is this latter kind of debating which has prejudiced the public against debates.

A real debate should be a clear presentment of two opposing schools of thought by men who understand both, but basically disagree as to their truth. Such a debate has an educational value of the very highest order.

Every speech, as in lecturing, should have a strong close. The last point can usually be selected before the debate begins, as it will probably deal with the valuable results flowing from your position. This method enables you to prepare the closing sentence or sentences--which is of great importance. It is one of the great disadvantages of debate that your speeches are liable to end lame and if you can avoid this, one of your knottiest problems is solved.

A strong point also should be selected to open with; a point that will put the audience in good humor by its wit is especially valuable. But remember wit is only valuable when it bears on the question and strengthens or ill.u.s.trates an argument. Any indulgence in wit merely to turn a laugh against your opponent will disgust the intelligent members of the audience and the pity is that there are always block-heads to applaud such deplorable methods. The platform suffers an irreparable loss whenever it is used by debaters whom nature intended for "shyster"

lawyers.

As an example of a good point for opening a reply, take the following from my debate in the Garrick, October, 1907:

My opponent, Mr. Hardinge, said, "As an Individualist Mr. Spencer was an extremist in one direction, and the Socialist is an extremist in the other. I take a middle ground; you will always find the truth about half way."

My note of this (in blue) was, "extremist, middle ground." My note of answer (in red) was "revolving earth."

This was the answer as I made it from these two notes:

"Mr. Hardinge said we should not be Socialists because we should then be as great extremists in one direction as was Mr. Spencer in the other. We should follow Mr. Hardinge's example and take the middle ground for, says he, truth is always to be found half way. Therefore, if anyone should ask you, does the earth revolve from east to west, or from west to east, you should answer, 'a little of both.'"

It would have been small consolation to Mr. Hardinge to know that this reply was taken from the individualist Spencer, who should have been his mainstay in the debate. But such things are common property and I had just as much right to take it from Spencer as he had to take it from George Eliot.

CHAPTER XVI

TRICKS OF DEBATE

There are a great number of tricks that may be practiced in debate. They should be avoided by the serious man who is debating to defend a great cause. It is well to know the best methods but anything like a trick should never be practiced.

Some debaters I have met actually consider it smart to fill an opening speech with empty words so as to handicap their opponent by giving him nothing to reply to. This is precisely what Mr. Mangasarian did in his debate with me, but although many disagree with me, I take the view that he did so, not as a trick, but because of his ignorance of the question and his want of experience in debate. To have done this deliberately as a clever trick, after allowing an audience of 3,000 to pay over $1,100 for their seats would have been criminal, and I refuse to believe that any public man of Mr. Mangasarian's status would stoop to any such performance as a matter of deliberate strategy.

On one occasion, when the subject of discussion was not of any such serious import as Socialism, but more a question of who could win a debate on a subject of small merit, I defeated my opponent by a trick that I am heartily ashamed of, even under those mitigating circ.u.mstances. I record it here, not as an example to be followed, but as a warning not to let anyone else use it against you.

Unskilled debaters usually reply to their opponent's points in the order in which they were presented--seriatim. This is easy but not most effective.

This opponent, whom I heard debate with someone else before I was engaged to try conclusions with him, was limited, as I saw, to the seriatim method of reply. When we met, I completely destroyed his influence on the audience by the following trick:

Having the affirmative, I had to open and close, which gave me three speeches to his two. In my first speech instead of taking five to ten good points only, I added a good number of other points, stating them briefly and just giving him time to get them down. These extra points cost me about one minute each to state, and I knew they would cost him at least four or five to reply. Then just before closing I very seriously advanced the heaviest objection to my opponent's position. I especially called the attention of my audience to this point and declared it to be unanswerable and hoped my opponent would not forget to make a note of it. Then I paused long enough for the audience to see that I gave him full opportunity to get it down--as he did. Then I gathered my threads together and entered on my peroration.

It worked out precisely as I had antic.i.p.ated. My opponent began at the beginning, as he saw it, and all his time went over those decoy points and the chairman rapped him down long before he reached that special point.

I then repeated the same tactics only I loaded him more heavily with decoys than before. I called upon the audience to witness that in spite of my begging him to do so, he had never so much as mentioned the main difficulty in his position.

In his second and last speech, he saw the necessity of getting to that point but, alas, although he hustled through the column of stumbling blocks so rapidly that the audience hardly knew what he was talking about, just as he was about to reply to this much-paraded difficulty of mine--and it really was the main weakness of his position--down came the chairman's gavel.

Then I lashed him unmercifully. I called the attention of the audience to the fact that twice I had especially begged him to answer this question and he had repeatedly failed to do so. The audience, of course, drew the inference that he was unable to answer, and he was considered to be hopelessly defeated.

He should, by all means, have given that point his first consideration before dealing with the rest of my speech.

This gentleman had humiliated quite a number of young aspirants in the local debating cla.s.s, and openly boasted of the clever tricks by which he had done so. For once, however, he was "hoist on his own petard."

CHAPTER XVII

RHETORIC

It is the function of language to convey ideas. Ideas are the real foundation of good lecturing and words must always be subordinate.

The English Parliamentarian, Gladstone, had the reputation of being able to say less in more time than any man who ever lived. The difference between a good and a bad use of words is well ill.u.s.trated in the discussion between Gladstone and Huxley on Genesis and Science. Of course everybody knows now that Gladstone was annihilated, in spite of the cleverness with which, when beaten, he would, in Huxley's phrase, "retreat under a cloud of words."

Grandiloquence will produce, in the more intelligent of your audience, an amused smile, and while it is well to have your hearers smile with you, they should never have reason to smile at you.

Here again, a great deal depends on what you have been reading. In the use of good, clear, powerful English, Prof. Huxley is without a peer, and his "collected essays" will always remain a precious heritage in English literature. For an example of the exact opposite, take the magazines and pamphlets of the so-called new thought, which at bottom is neither "new" nor "thought." In reality it is made up of words, words, and then--more words.

I read a fifteen hundred word article, in a new thought magazine, by one of its foremost prophets, and nowhere from beginning to end, was there a single tangible idea, nothing but a long drawn out ma.s.s of meaningless jargon.

"Thus spake Zarathustra" is the same thing at its best. As an example of a style to be carefully avoided the following is in point. It is also a rara avis; a gem of purest ray. It is taken from the local Socialist platform of an Arizona town:

Therefore, it matters not, though the Creator decked the earth with prolific soil, and deposited within great stores of wealth for man's enjoyment, for, if Economic Equality is ostracised, man is enslaved and the world surges through s.p.a.ce around the sun, a gilded prison. It matters not, though the infinite blue vast be sown with innumerable stars and the earth be adorned with countless beauties, teeming with the multiplicity of living forms for man's edification, for if Liberty is exiled, the intellect is robbed and man knows not himself. It matters not, though nature opens her generous purse and pours forth melodies of her myriad-tongued voices for man's delectation, for, if the shackles of wage slavery are not loosed, the mind is stultified and ambition destroyed by the long hours of toil's monotony in the factory, the machine shop, in the mines, at the desk, and on the farm. It matters not, though the fireside of the home sheds forth a radiance in which is blended paternal love, health and happiness, for, if woman is denied equal suffrage, then this queen of the household, perforce, becomes a moral slave.

Man, therefore, is not the sovereign citizen as pictured by the flashing phrases of the orator and soothsayer.