Public Speaking A - Z, How to Define Aim and Purpose in Speech

In all successful oratory there must be a clearly defined aim and purpose. The speaker should endeavor to find out where his special power lies and work in that direction, always remembering that the loftier the aim the greater the possible achievement. Beecher said: "Let no man who is a sneak try to be an orator." There must be intrinsic worth. A man must be and not seem. An audience can not long be deceived. The speaker will shortly be estimated at his true value. The development of the sympathetic nature should not be neglected. The transforming power of deep affection is described by Balzac, when he says of Père Goriot, "Père Goriot was stirred out of himself. Never till now had Eugene seen him thus lighted up by the passion of paternity. We may here remark on the infiltrating, transforming power of an over-mastering emotion. However coarse the fiber of the individual, let him be held by a strong and genuine affection, and he exhales, as it were, an essence which illuminates his features, inspires his gestures, and gives cadence to his voice."

EXAMPLES

1. And, since the thoughts and reasonings of an author have, as I have said, a personal character, no wonder that his style is not only the image of his subject, but of his mind. That pomp of language, that full and tuneful diction, that felicitousness in the choice and exquisiteness in the collocation of words, which to prosaic writers seem artificial, is nothing else but the mere habit and way of a lofty intellect. Aristotle, in his sketch of the magnanimous man, tells us that his voice is deep, his motions slow, and his stature commanding. In like manner, the elocution of a great intellect is great.

His language expresses, not only his great thoughts, but his great self.

Certainly he might use fewer words than he uses; but he fertilizes his simplest ideas, and germinates into a multitude of details, and prolongs the march of his sentences, and sweeps round to the full diapason of his harmony, rejoicing in his own vigor and richness of resource.

CARDINAL "NEWMAN.

2. I have no light or knowledge not common to my country men. I do not prophesy. The present is all-absorbing to me, but I cannot bound my vision by the blood-stained trenches around Manila, where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided Filipino, is anguish to my heart; but by the broad range of future years, when that group of islands, under the impulse of the year just past, shall have become the gems and glories of those tropical seas; a land of plenty and of increasing possibilities; a people redeemed from savage indolence and habits, devoted to the arts of peace, in touch with the commerce and trade of all nations, enjoying the blessings of freedom, of civil and religious liberty, of education and of homes, and whose children and children's children shall for ages hence bless the American Republic because it emancipated and redeemed their fatherland and set them in the pathway of the world's best civilization.

"Our Duty to the Philippines ." WILLIAM MCKINLEY.