[18] Effective Speaking, Arthur Edward Phillips. This work covers the preparation of public speech in a very helpful way.
CHAPTER XX
INFLUENCING BY DESCRIPTION
The groves of Eden vanish'd now so long,
Live in description, and look green in song.
—Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest.
The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature.
Like other valuable resources in public speaking, description loses its power when carried to an extreme. Over-ornamentation makes the subject ridiculous. A dust-cloth is a very useful thing, but why embroider it? Whether description shall be restrained within its proper and important limits, or be encouraged to run riot, is the personal choice that comes before every speaker, for man's earliest literary tendency is to depict.
The Nature of Description