The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

by Dale Carnegie

All that is doubly true of effective speaking. There is no other human being in the world like you. Hundreds of millions of people have two eyes and a nose and a mouth; but none of them looks precisely like you; and none of them has exactly your traits and methods and cast of mind. Few of them will talk and express themselves just as you do when you are speaking naturally. In other words, you have an individuality.

As a speaker, it is your most precious possession. Cling to it. Cherish it. Develop it. It is the spark that will put force and sincerity into your speaking. “It is your only real claim to importance.” Please, I beg you, do not attempt to force yourself in a mold and thereby lose your distinctiveness.

THIRD Converse with You...

A modern audience, regardless of whether it is fifteen people at a business conference or a thousand people under a tent, wants the speaker to talk just as directly as he would in a chat, and in the same general manner he would employ in speaking to one of them in conversation, in the same manner, but with greater force or energy.

In order to appear natural, he has to use much more energy in talking to forty people than he does in talking to one, just as a statue on top of a building has to be of heroic size in order to make it appear of lifelike proportions to an observer on the ground.

That is what the audience wants: “your natural tones of eloquence,” enlarged a bit. The only way to acquire the knack of this enlarged naturalness is by practice.

FOURTH Put Your Heart into Your Speaking

Sincerity and enthusiasm and high earnestness will help you, too. When a man is under the influence of his feelings, his real self comes to the surface. The bars are down. The heat of his emotions has burned all barriers away. He acts spontaneously. He talks spontaneously. He is natural.

FIFTH Practice Making Your Voice Strong and Flexible

The so-called variables, or modulations of tone, are under the direct influence of our mental and emotional state. That is why it is so important that we have a topic we know and a topic we are excited about when we go before an audience. That is why we must be so eager to share that topic with our listeners. Since most of us lose the spontaneity and naturalness of youth as we grow older, we tend to slip into a definite mold of physical and vocal communication. We find ourselves less ready to use gestures and animation; we rarely raise or lower our voices from one pitch to another. In short, we lose the freshness and spontaneity of true conversation.

It is an excellent idea to evaluate oneself in terms of volume, pitch variation, and pace. This can be done with the aid of a tape recorder. On the other hand, it would be useful to have friends help you make this evaluation. If it is possible to secure expert advice, so much the better. It should be remembered, however, that these are areas for practice away from the audience. To concern yourself with technique when you are before an audience will prove fatal to effectiveness. Once there, pour yourself into your talk, concentrate your whole being on making a mental and emotional impact on your audience, and nine chances out of ten you will speak with more emphasis and force than you could ever get from books.

Here are some simple rules that will help you to build up a strong feeling of rapport with your listeners.

FIRST Talk in Terms of Your Listeners’ Interests

Ask yourself how knowledge of your subject will help the members of your audience solve their problems and achieve their goals. Then proceed to show them that, and you will have their complete attention. If you are an accountant and you start your talk by saying something like this, “I am going to show you how to save from fifty to a hundred dollars on your tax return,” or you are a lawyer and you tell your listeners how to go about making a will, you will be certain to have an interested audience. Surely, there is some topic in your special fund of knowledge that can be of real help to members of your audience.

The next time you face an audience, visualize them as eager to hear what you have to say—as long as it applies to them. Speakers who fail to take this essential egocentricity of their listeners into account are apt to find themselves facing a restless audience, one squirming in boredom, glancing at wristwatches, and looking hopefully toward the exit doors.

SECOND Give Honest, Sincere Appreciation

THIRD Identify Yourself with the Audience

FOURTH Make Your Audience a Partner in Your Talk

FIFTH Play Yourself Down

every talk, regardless of whether the speaker realizes it or not, has one of four major goals. What are they?

To persuade or get action. To inform. To impress and convince. To entertain.

By using the Magic Formula you can be certain of gaining attention and focusing it upon the main point of your message. It cautions against indulgence in vapid opening remarks, such as: “I didn’t have time to prepare this talk very well,” or “When your chairman asked me to talk on this subject, I wondered why he selected me.” Audiences are not interested in apologies or excuses, real or simulated. They want action. In the Magic Formula you give them action from the opening word.

The Magic Formula can be used also in writing business letters and giving instructions to fellow employees and subordinates. Mothers can use it when motivating their children, and children will find it useful when appealing to their parents for a favor or privilege. You will find it a psychological tool that can be used to get your ideas across to others every day of your life.

In the Example step, the announcer told of someone’s experience of being trapped, for instance, in an overturned car late at night. After giving the graphic details of the accident, he then called upon the victim to finish the story by telling how the beams of the flashlight, powered by Eveready Batteries, brought help in time. Then the announcer went on to the Point and Reason: “Buy Eveready Batteries and you may survive a similar emergency.” These stories were all true experiences out of the Eveready Battery Company’s files. I don’t know how many Eveready Batteries this particular advertising series sold, but I do know that the Magic Formula is an effective method of presenting what you want an audience to do, or to avoid.

FIRST Give Your Example, an Incident from Your Life

Below are a number of suggestions which will help to make the Example step of your action talk clear, intense, and meaningful.

BUILD YOUR EXAMPLE UPON A SINGLE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

START YOUR TALK WITH A DETAIL OF YOUR EXAMPLE

Take a tip from top-flight magazine and newspaper writers: begin right in your example and you will capture the attention of your audience immediately.

Here are some opening sentences that drew my attention like a magnet: “In 1942, I found myself on a cot in a hospital”; “Yesterday at breakfast my wife was pouring the coffee and...”; “Last July I was driving at a fast clip down Highway 42...”; “The door of my office opened and Charlie Vann, our foreman, burst in”; “I was fishing in the middle of the lake; I looked up and saw a motor boat speeding toward me.”

If you start your talk with phrases that answer one of the questions, Who? When? Where? What? How? or Why?, you will be using one of the oldest communication devices in the world to get attention—the story. “Once upon a time” are the magic words that open the floodgates of a child’s imagination. With this same human in...

But relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picturize it for the audience. To say merely that you once had an accident because of negligence is bald, uninteresting, and hardly likely to move anyone to be more careful behind the wheel of a car. But to paint a word picture of your frightening experience, using the full range of multi-sensory phraseology, will etch the event upon the consciousness of the listeners.

RELIVE YOUR EXPERIENCE AS YOU RELATE IT

Many persons of our acquaintance are gifted with a sense of timing, facial expression, mimicry, or pantomime that is a part, at least, of this priceless ability to dramatize. Most of us have some skill along these lines, and with a little effort and practice we can develop more of it.

SECOND State Your Point, What You Want the Audience to Do

THIRD Give the Reason or Benefit the Audience May Expect

THE TALK TO INFORM

In Chapter Seven, you received a formula for making short talks to get action from your listeners. Now, I am going to give you methods to help make your meaning clear when you set out to inform, and not motivate, your listeners.

FIRST Restrict Your Subject to Fit the Time at Your Disposal

Many a talk fails to be clear because the speaker seems intent upon establishing a world’s record for ground covered in the allotted time. He leaps from one point to another with the swiftness and agility of a mountain goat If, for example, you are to speak on Labor Unions, do not attempt to tell us in three or six minutes why they came into existence, the methods they employ, the good they have accomplished, the evil they have wrought, and how to solve industrial disputes.

Wouldn’t it be the part of wisdom to take one phase, and one phase only, of labor unions, and cover that adequately and illustrate it? It would. That kind of talk leaves a single impression. It is lucid, easy to listen to, easy to remember.

Hold fast to your main theme. If you are to make yourself clear, your hearers must always be able to say, “I understand him. I know where he is now!”

SECOND Arrange Your Ideas in Sequence

Almost all subjects can be developed by using a logical sequence based on time, space, or special topics. In the time sequence, for instance, you might consider your subject under the three categories of past, present, and future, or you might begin at a certain date and move backward or forward from that date. All process talks, for example, should begin at the raw-material stage and move through the various manufacturing steps t...

THIRD Enumerate Your Points as You Make Them

FOURTH Compare the Strange with the Familiar

Sometimes you will find yourself floundering in a vain attempt to explain your meaning. It’s something quite clear to you but requiring involved explanation if your hearers are to be clear about it too. What to do? Compare it with something your hearers do understand; say one thing is like the other, the strange like the familiar.

TURN A FACT INTO A PICTURE

He said Alaska’s area was 590,804 square miles, and dropped the attempt to show its size right there.

Does this give you any kind of picture of the size of the 49th State? It didn’t give me one.