"Reference to experience, as here used, means reference to the known. The known is that which the listener has seen, heard, read, felt, believed or done, and which still exists in his consciousness--his stock of knowledge. It embraces all those thoughts, feelings and happenings which are to him real. Reference to Experience, then, means _coming into the listener's life_.[18]

The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all habitually, and at every moment, use carelessly.

--THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, _Lay Sermons_.

Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John!

--SHAKESPEARE, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.

Finally, in preparing expository material ask yourself these questions regarding your subject:

What is it, and what is it not?
What is it like, and unlike?
What are its causes, and effects?
How shall it be divided?
With what subjects is it correlated?
What experiences does it recall?
What examples illustrate it?

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What would be the effect of adhering to any one of the forms of discourse in a public address?

2. Have you ever heard such an address?

3. Invent a series of examples illustrative of the distinctions made on pages 232 and 233.

4. Make a list of ten subjects that might be treated largely, if not entirely, by exposition.

5. Name the six standards by which expository writing should be tried.

6. Define any one of the following: (_a_) storage battery; (_b_) "a free hand;" (_c_) sail boat; (_d_) "The Big Stick;" (_e_) nonsense; (_f_) "a good sport;" (_g_) short-story; (_h_) novel; (_i_) newspaper; (_j_) politician; (_k_) jealousy; (_l_) truth; (_m_) matinée girl; (_n_) college honor system; (_o_) modish; (_p_) slum; (_q_) settlement work; (_r_) forensic.

7. Amplify the definition by antithesis.

8. Invent two examples to illustrate the definition (question 6).

9. Invent two analogies for the same subject (question 6).

10. Make a short speech based on one of the following: (_a_) wages and salary; (_b_) master and man; (_c_) war and peace; (_d_) home and the boarding house; (_e_) struggle and victory; (_f_) ignorance and ambition.

11. Make a ten-minute speech on any of the topics named in question 6, using all the methods of exposition already named.

12. Explain what is meant by discarding topics collateral and subordinate to a subject.

13. Rewrite the jury-speech on page 224.

14. Define correlation.

15. Write an example of "classification," on any political, social, economic, or moral issue of the day.

16. Make a brief analytical statement of Henry W. Grady's "The Race Problem," page 36.

17. By what analytical principle did you proceed? (See page 225.)

18. Write a short, carefully generalized speech from a large amount of data on one of the following subjects: (_a_) The servant girl problem; (_b_) cats; (_c_) the baseball craze; (_d_) reform administrations; (_e_) sewing societies; (_f_) coeducation; (_g_) the traveling salesman.

19. Observe this passage from Newton's "Effective Speaking:"

"That man is a cynic. He sees goodness nowhere. He sneers at virtue, sneers at love; to him the maiden plighting her troth is an artful schemer, and he sees even in the mother's kiss nothing but an empty conventionality."

Write, commit and deliver two similar passages based on your choice from this list: (_a_) "the egotist;" (_b_) "the sensualist;" (_c_) "the hypocrite;" (_d_) "the timid man;" (_e_) "the joker;" (_f_) "the flirt;" (_g_) "the ungrateful woman;" (_h_) "the mournful man." In both cases use the principle of "Reference to Experience."

20. Write a passage on any of the foregoing characters in imitation of the style of Shakespeare's characterization of Sir John Falstaff, page 227.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Argumentation will be outlined fully in subsequent chapter.]

[Footnote 13: _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F. Genung.]

[Footnote 14: _How to Attract and Hold an Audience_, J. Berg Esenwein.]

[Footnote 15: On the various types of definition see any college manual of Rhetoric.]

[Footnote 16: Quoted in _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F. Genung.]

[Footnote 16A: Quoted in _The Working Principles of Rhetoric_, J.F. Genung.]

[Footnote 17: G.C.V. Holmes, quoted in _Specimens of Exposition_, H. Lamont.]

[Footnote 18: _Effective Speaking_, Arthur Edward Phillips. This work covers the preparation of public speech in a very helpful way.]