the closet, for your practise at home. Do not carry any thoughts of inflection

with you to the platform. There you must _think_ only of your subject. There is

an absolute telepathy between the audience and the speaker. If your thought goes

to your gesture, their thought will too. If your interest goes to the quality of

your voice, they will be regarding that instead of what your voice is uttering.

 

You have doubtless been adjured to "forget everything but your subject." This

advice says either too much or too little. The truth is that while on the

platform you must not _forget_ a great many things that are not in your subject,

but you must not _think_ of them. Your attention must consciously go only to

your message, but subconsciously you will be attending to the points of

technique which have become more or less _habitual by practise_.

 

A nice balance between these two kinds of attention is important.

 

You can no more escape this law than you can live without air: Your platform

gestures, your voice, your inflection, will all be just as good as your _habit_

of gesture, voice, and inflection makes them--no better. Even the thought of

whether you are speaking fluently or not will have the effect of marring your

flow of speech.

 

Return to the opening chapter, on self-confidence, and again lay its precepts to

heart. Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules. It is not--or ought

not to be--necessary for you to stop to think how to say the alphabet correctly,

as a matter of fact it is slightly more difficult for you to repeat Z, Y, X than