As to conversation and its making a “ready” man, a better method perhaps, is to argue the matter out with a mirror, or the wall, in about the same manner and style as you expect to use on the platform.

To practice before one or two persons in the style you expect to adopt before an audience is so inherently incompatible with the different circumstances, that I don’t believe anybody ever made it succeed. It is far better to be alone, especially when working out your most important points, and building your opening and closing sentences.

Probably the best form of lecturing is to speak from a few pages of notes. A clearly defined skeleton, in a lecture, as in an animal, is the sure sign of high organization, while it is desirable to fill in the flesh and clothes with a pen beforehand, it will be well to learn to deliver it to the public with nothing but the skeleton before you.

In course lectures, quotations must be read, as a rule, as there is not time enough between lectures to commit them to memory. But where the same lecture is given repeatedly before different audiences, this condition does not exist, and the quotations should be memorized. Frequent quotations, from the best authorities, is one of the marks of a good lecture, as of a good book.

A good plan is to write out the skeleton of the lecture fully at first, say fifteen or twenty note book pages, then think it carefully over and condense to about ten. A really good, well organized lecture where the lecturer has had ample time, or when he has already delivered it a few times, should be reducible to one or two pages of notes.

This skeletonizing is a good test of a lecture. A mere collection of words has no skeleton. Instead of comparing with a mammal at the top of the organic scale, it is like a formless, undifferentiated protozoon at the bottom.

As an example of a skeleton, here are the notes of the lecture with which I closed the season at the Garrick in May, 1907:

SOCIALISM AND MODERN ETHICAL SCIENCE

  1. The general confusion on this question.
  2. The inroads of positive science into this field.
  3. The historical schools of Ethics:
    1. The Theological.
    2. The intuitional.
    3. The utilitarian.
      1. Define these;
      2. explain;
      3. criticise.
  4. Modern science endorses utilitarianism.
  5. This still leaves unsettled the problem of who shall determine what is of utility to society?
  6. Marx gave the answer—The ruling class.
  7. They rule because they control society’s foundation, its mode of production.
  8. The working class, in order to enforce its own ethics must control society at its base; it must take possession of the means of production.

  1. The general confusion on this question.
  2. The inroads of positive science into this field.
  3. The historical schools of Ethics:
    1. The Theological.
    2. The intuitional.
    3. The utilitarian.
      1. Define these;
      2. explain;
      3. criticise.
  4. Modern science endorses utilitarianism.
  5. This still leaves unsettled the problem of who shall determine what is of utility to society?
  6. Marx gave the answer—The ruling class.
  7. They rule because they control society’s foundation, its mode of production.
  8. The working class, in order to enforce its own ethics must control society at its base; it must take possession of the means of production.

When I first delivered this lecture I had about twenty pages of notes nearly twice the size of this book page, the three items, “define,” “explain,” “criticize,” taking half a dozen.