MAKING THE OUTLINE OR BRIEF
Orderly Arrangement. A speech should have an orderly arrangement. The effect upon an audience will be more easily made, more deeply impressed, more clearly retained, if the successive steps of the development are so well marked, so plainly related, that they may be carried away in a hearer's understanding. It might be said that one test of a good speech is the vividness with which its framework is discernible. Hearers can repeat outlines of certain speeches. Those are the best. Of others they can give merely confused reports. These are the badly constructed ones.
The way to secure in the delivered speech this delight of orderly arrangement is by making an outline or brief. Most pupils hate to make outlines. The reason for this repugnance is easily understood. A teacher directs a pupil to make an outline before he writes a composition or delivers a speech. The pupil spends hours on the list of entries, then submits his finished theme or address. He feels that the outline is disregarded entirely. Sometimes he is not even required to hand it to the instructor. He considers the time he has spent upon the outline as wasted. It is almost impossible to make him feel that his finished product is all the better because of this effort spent upon the preliminary skeleton, so that in reality his outline is not disregarded at all, but is judged and marked as embodied in the finished article. Most students carry this mistaken feeling about outlines to such an extent that when required to hand in both an outline and a finished composition they will write in haphazard fashion the composition first, and then from it try to prepare the outline, instead of doing as they are told, and making the outline first. It is easier—though not as educating or productive of good results—to string words together than it is to do what outline-making demands—to think.
Professional Writers' Use of Outlines. Professional writers realize the helpfulness of outline-making and the time it saves. Many a magazine article has been sold before a word of the finished manuscript was written. The contributor submitted an outline from which the editor contracted for the finished production. Many a play has been placed in the same form. Books are built up in the same manner. The ubiquitous moving-picture scenario is seldom produced in any other manner.
Macaulay advised a young friend who asked how to keep his brain active to read a couple of solid books, making careful outlines of their material at the same time. One of these should be—if possible—a work in a foreign tongue, so that the strangeness of the language would necessitate slow, careful reading and close thinking. All good students know that the best way to prepare for an examination is to make outlines of all the required reading and study.
It is just because the making of the outline demands such careful thinking that it is one of the most important steps in the production of a speech.
The Outline in the Finished Speech. If the outline really shows in the finished speech, let us see if we can pick the entries out from a portion of one. Edmund Burke in 1775 tried to prevent Great Britain from using coercive measures against the restive American colonies. Many Englishmen were already clamoring for war when Burke spoke in Parliament upon conciliating the Colonies.
I am sensible, Sir, that all which I have asserted in my detail, is admitted in the gross; but that quite a different conclusion is drawn from it. America, gentlemen say, is a noble object. It is an object well worth fighting for. Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them. Gentlemen in this respect will be led to their choice of means by their complexions and their habits. Those who understand the military art, will of course have some predilection for it. Those who wield the thunder of the state, may have more confidence in the efficacy of arms. But I confess, possibly for want of this knowledge, my opinion is much more in favor of prudent management, than of force; considering force not as an odious, but a feeble instrument, for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connexion with us.
First, Sir, permit me to observe, that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.