Public Speaking A - Z, How to Add Earnestness to Your Speech

Earnestness is the natural language of sincerity and high purpose. It manifests itself in voice, look, and gesture. It is the result of deep conviction, sympathy, self-abandonment, and a heartfelt desire to share the truth with others. The act of standing before an audience should kindle the heart and imagination of any speaker, but we know from observation that this is not always the case. Frequently an audience is strange, cold, and unresponsive, but here the speaker must call to his aid the power of self-excitation. He must have faith in himself and in his message.

The speaker should realize that he is, to quote Nathan Sheppard, "An animal galvanic battery on two legs!" The physical apparatus should be so trained as to promptly and correctly respond to every demand made upon it.

In true earnestness there is no place for violence or impulsiveness. All must be well considered. Exaggerated shaking of the head, rolling the eyes, twisting and contorting the body, meaningless gesture,-all are to be studiously avoided. In the early stages of practicing, where there is a lack of feeling, it may for a time be assumed. Sluggish emotions can in this way be aroused and subsequent efforts will become less and less difficult.

Nothing contributes more to the well-springs of genuine feeling than long and varied experience among all classes of people. To accustom oneself to sharing the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, of others, will cultivate the deepest feelings of the human heart.

EXAMPLES

1. Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of wisdom, of peace, and of liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever!

DANIEL WEBSTER.

2. But them, 0 Florence , take the offered mercy. See! The cross is held out to you; come and be healed. Which among the nations of Italy has had a token like unto yours? The tyrant is driven out from among you; the men who held a bribe in their left hand and a rod in their right, are gone forth, and no blood has been spilled. And now put away every other abomination from among you, and you shall be strong in the strength of the living God. Wash yourself from the black pitch of your vices, which have made you even as the heathens; put away the envy and hatred that have made your city as a nest of wolves. And there shall no harm happen to you; and the passage of armies shall be to you as the flight of birds, and rebellious Pisa shall be given to you again, and famine and pestilence shall be far from your gates, and you shall be as a beacon among the nations. But, mark! while you suffer the accursed thing to lie in the camp, you shall be afflicted and tormented, even tho a remnant among you may be saved.

Savonarola in "Romola." GEORGE ELIOT.

3. Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation-or any nation so conceived and so dedicated-can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here, to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

At the Dedication of Gettysburg Cemetery. LINCOLN.