etition, to
violation of good taste."

Slovenliness in planning is as bad as slovenliness in expression.

EXERCISES

Choose any topic suggested in this book. Make a short preliminary plan
of a speech upon it. Present it to the class. Consider it from the
following requirements:

1. Does it show clearly its intention?

2. How long will the speech be?

3. Too long? Too short?

4. For what kind of audience is it intended?

5. Has it unity?

6. Has it coherence?

7. Where are transitions most clearly needed?

8. What suggestions would you make for rearranging any parts?

9. What reasons have you for these changes?

10. Is proper emphasis secured?

CHAPTER VIII

MAKING THE OUTLINE OR BRIEF

Orderly Arrangement. A speech should have an orderly arrangement. The
effect upon an audience will be more easily made, more deeply
impressed, more clearly retained, if the successive steps of the
development are so well marked, so plainly related, that they may be
carried away in a hearer's understanding. It might be said that one
test of a good speech is the vividness with which its framework is
discernible. Hearers can repeat outlines of certain speeches. Those
are the best. Of others they can give merely confused reports. These
are the badly constructed ones.

The way to secure in the delivered speech this delight of orderly
arrangement is by making an outline or brief. Most pupils hate to make
outlines. The reason for this repugnance is easily understood. A
teacher directs a pupil to make an outline before he writes a
composition or delivers a speech. The pupil spends hours on the list
of entries, then submits his finished theme or address. He feels that
the outline is disregarded entirely. Sometimes he is not even required
to hand it to the instructor. He considers the time he has spent upon
the outline as wasted. It is almost impossible to make him feel that
his finished product is all the better because of this effort spent
upon the preliminary skeleton, so that in reality his outline is not
disregarded at all, but is judged and marked as embodied in the
finished article. Most students carry this mistaken feeling about
outlines to such an extent that when required to hand in both an
outline and a finished composition they will write in haphazard
fashion the composition first, and then from it try to prepare the
outline, instead of doing as they are told, and making the outline
first. It is easier