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The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein onlineVI PAUSE AND POWERpage 4 of 7 | page 1 | table of contents  Take time, you have just as much of it as our richest multimillionaire. Your audience will wait for you. It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The great redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five hundred years before Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are only in their prime today. Nature shames us with our petty haste. Silence is one of the most eloquent things in the world. Master it, and use it through pause. * * * * * In the following selections dashes have been inserted where pauses may be used effectively. Naturally, you may omit some of these and insert others without going wrong--one speaker would interpret a passage in one way, one in another; it is largely a matter of personal preference. A dozen great actors have played Hamlet well, and yet each has played the part differently. Which comes the nearest to perfection is a question of opinion. You will succeed best by daring to follow your own course--if you are individual enough to blaze an original trail. A moment's halt--a momentary taste of being from the well amid the waste--and lo! the phantom caravan has reached--the nothing it set out from--Oh make haste! The worldly hope men set their hearts upon--turns ashes--or it prospers;--and anon like snow upon the desert's dusty face--lighting a little hour or two--is gone. The bird of time has but a little way to flutter,--and the bird is on the wing. You will note that the punctuation marks have nothing to do with the pausing. You may run by a period very quickly and make a long pause where there is no kind of punctuation. Thought is greater than punctuation. It must guide you in your pauses. A book of verses underneath the bough,--a jug of wine, a loaf of bread--and thou beside me singing in the wilderness--Oh--wilderness were paradise enow. You must not confuse the pause for emphasis with the natural pauses that come through taking breath and phrasing. For example, note the pauses indicated in this selection from Byron: But _hush!_--_hark!_--that deep sound breaks in once more, It is not necessary to dwell at length upon these obvious distinctions. You will observe that in natural conversation our words are gathered into clusters or phrases, and we often pause to take breath between them. So in public speech, breathe naturally and do not talk until you must gasp for breath; nor until the audience is equally winded. A serious word of caution must here be uttered: do not overwork the pause. To do so will make your speech heavy and stilted. And do not think that pause can transmute commonplace thoughts into great and dignified utterance. A grand manner combined with insignificant ideas is like harnessing a Hambletonian with an ass. You remember the farcical old school declamation, "A Midnight Murder," that proceeded in grandiose manner to a thrilling climax, and ended--"and relentlessly murdered--a mosquito!" The pause, dramatically handled, always drew a laugh from the tolerant hearers. This is all very well in farce, but such anti-climax becomes painful when the speaker falls from the sublime to the ridiculous quite unintentionally. The pause, to be effective in some other manner than in that of the boomerang, must precede or follow a thought that is really worth while, or at least an idea whose bearing upon the rest of the speech is important. |