The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein online

III EFFICIENCY THROUGH EMPHASIS AND SUBORDINATION

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It would be a boon to speech-making if speakers would conserve the attention of their audiences in the same way and emphasize only the words representing the important ideas. The average speaker will deliver the foregoing line on destiny with about the same amount of emphasis on each word. Instead of saying, "It is a matter of _CHOICE_," he will deliver it, "It is a matter of choice," or "_IT IS A MATTER OF CHOICE_"--both equally bad.

Charles Dana, the famous editor of _The New York Sun_, told one of his reporters that if he went up the street and saw a dog bite a man, to pay no attention to it. _The Sun_ could not afford to waste the time and attention of its readers on such unimportant happenings. "But," said Mr. Dana, "if you see a man bite a dog, hurry back to the office and write the story." Of course that is news; that is unusual.

Now the speaker who says "_IT IS A MATTER OF CHOICE_" is putting too much emphasis upon things that are of no more importance to metropolitan readers than a dog bite, and when he fails to emphasize "choice" he is like the reporter who "passes up" the man's biting a dog. The ideal speaker makes his big words stand out like mountain peaks; his unimportant words are submerged like stream-beds. His big thoughts stand like huge oaks; his ideas of no especial value are merely like the grass around the tree.

From all this we may deduce this important principle: _EMPHASIS_ is a matter of _CONTRAST_ and _COMPARISON_.

Recently the _New York American_ featured an editorial by Arthur Brisbane. Note the following, printed in the same type as given here.

=We do not know what the President THOUGHT when he got that message, or what the elephant thinks when he sees the mouse, but we do know what the President DID.=

The words _THOUGHT_ and _DID_ immediately catch the reader's attention because they are different from the others, not especially because they are larger. If all the rest of the words in this sentence were made ten times as large as they are, and _DID_ and _THOUGHT_ were kept at their present size, they would still be emphatic, because different.

Take the following from Robert Chambers' novel, "The Business of Life." The words _you_, _had_, _would_, are all emphatic, because they have been made different.

He looked at her in angry astonishment.

"Well, what do _you_ call it if it isn't cowardice--to slink off and marry a defenseless girl like that!"

"Did you expect me to give you a chance to destroy me and poison Jacqueline's mind? If I _had_ been guilty of the thing with which you charge me, what I have done _would_ have been cowardly. Otherwise, it is justified."

A Fifth Avenue bus would attract attention up at Minisink Ford, New York, while one of the ox teams that frequently pass there would attract attention on Fifth Avenue. To make a word emphatic, deliver it differently from the manner in which the words surrounding it are delivered. If you have been talking loudly, utter the emphatic word in a concentrated whisper--and you have intense emphasis. If you have been going fast, go very slow on the emphatic word. If you have been talking on a low pitch, jump to a high one on the emphatic word. If you have been talking on a high pitch, take a low one on your emphatic ideas. Read the chapters on "Inflection," "Feeling," "Pause," "Change of Pitch," "Change of Tempo." Each of these will explain in detail how to get emphasis through the use of a certain principle.

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