TEN COMMANDMENTS.
To those who would become speakers and avoid the mistakes that cause the majority of failures, the following rules will be found valuable:
1. Do not try to tell all you know at any one time.
2. Do not try to appear deep, learned or poetical.
3. Do not try to prove every statement you make.
4. Use statistics sparingly.
5. Address yourself, not to the kind of men and women you would have made had you been the Creator, but to the actual men and women who have been created, who fill your halls and make up your audiences.
6. Make your talk personal and apply every point to the wants, woes and sentiments of your listeners.
7. Never regret the half hour or the hour occupied by the music, recitations, drama, or other entertainment preceding your speech.
8. Do not manifest impatience at the time consumed in short talks by local speakers.
9. Remember that generally all the good that it is possible for you to accomplish if your audience by preliminary exercises is brought into rapport and sympathy with you, can be accomplished in half an hour. If you can get the complete attention of your audience for half an hour, they will have sufficient matter to fully occupy their thoughts the rest of the day and night, and not only this, if your talk is interesting and they go away hungry instead of satiated, they will gladly attend the next meeting.
10. Be satisfied if you interest your hearers and be not greedy to instruct. For those really interested by oratory will instruct themselves by means of literature which is the only source of real instruction. Oratory should win sentiment and stir interest; literature performs the work of education. The speech fulfils its mission if it persuades men to read aright.