FUNDAMENTALS OF SPEECH Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers F-Y 436216 895 W913 PREFACE THE excuse for a new text on this old subject is the growing democratization of instruction in speech. The academic worth of the subject is now unquestioned, with the result that new courses in speech-training are multiplying, from primary grade to university graduate school. This is as it should be; for in a democratic country too much attention cannot be paid to instruction in speech. No democracy could possibly exist without a maximum of effectiveness in public and private discussion among its citizens. To meet this democratic need for educating the masses in effective speech methods a new text finds justification in proportion as it emphasizes the need for carrying speech instruction to all kinds and conditions of men. This book, then, is offered as a statement of fundamentals that lead into any of the paths the subject may take: conversation, common reading, interpretation, impersonation, public speaking, dramatics, and the speaking we call oratory. Democratization of speech-training is its prime object.To accomplish this object it aims to incorporate whatever methods have heretofore found favor by virtue of the good results they have produced. With this end in view it aims to offer speech-training for the whole man: body, voice, and mental mechanism. It is frankly psychological in foundation, and of psychologies is outspokenly behavioristic-that is to say, it insists that speech is a matter of the whole man, the coöperative activity of the entire organism; that it is a revelation of personality, but that the true definition of personality gives a picture compounded of thinking apparatus, emotional machinery, muscular activity, and body-wide participating parts-voice, brain, muscles, trunk, and limbs. Its essential thesis is that no speaking is good speaking which is not of the whole machine and which does not establish the desired relationship between the one speaking and the one listening. Hence, attention to training prize pupils is subordinated to care for all, even for redeeming the dull and the slow. Aimed at democratic ends, it holds in the focus of attention the ordinary student, however uninteresting or defective. It assumes that a teacher errs who gauges his work solely by his prize exhibits, his best pupils, his contest performers. Rather, it insists \ that the true gauge of a teacher's success is the showing he can make in improvement for the lower half, what he can accomplish for the jumblers, the mutterers, the inhibited, the fearful, the blatant, the windy—the vocally halt and lame. There should be little to interest the critic of a teacher's success when asked to pass judgment on only the best students in that teacher's classes. If you would know how great a success a teacher is, call for a parade of the weak and the afflicted; the teacher who can lead these unfortunate ones somewhere near to mediocrity is probably the one most genuinely successful. Any one by using a mere process of urging can usually get the bright pupils to do well, and almost any one, with even the slenderest of pedagogical methods, can keep from doing these fast-moving ones injury. But to keep from altogether wrecking the drifting ones, and then, better than this, to lift them out of the heavy seas that threaten to founder them, calls for a skilled pedagogie master and a comprehensive pedagogic method. It is in the hope of making it easier for the teacher |