If your message does not of itself arouse you to tension, _PULL_ yourself

together. When a man faces the necessity of leaping across a crevasse he does

not wait for inspiration, he _wills_ his muscles into tensity for the spring--it

is not without purpose that our English language uses the same word to depict a

mighty though delicate steel contrivance and a quick leap through the air. Then

resolve--and let it all end in actual _punch_.

 

This truth is worth reiteration: The man within is the final factor. He must

supply the fuel. The audience, or even the man himself, may add the match--it

matters little which, only so that there be fire. However skillfully your engine

is constructed, however well it works, you will have no force if the fire has

gone out under the boiler. It matters little how well you have mastered poise,

pause, modulation, and tempo, if your speech lacks fire it is dead. Neither a

dead engine nor a dead speech will move anybody.

 

Four factors of force are measurably within your control, and in that far may be

acquired: _ideas_, _feeling about the subject_, _wording_, and _delivery_. Each

of these is more or less fully discussed in this volume, except wording, which

really requires a fuller rhetorical study than can here be ventured. It is,

however, of the utmost importance that you should be aware of precisely how

wording bears upon force in a sentence. Study "The Working Principles of

Rhetoric," by John Franklin Genung, or the rhetorical treatises of Adams Sherman

Hill, of Charles Sears Baldwin, or any others whose names may easily be learned

from any teacher.