actise on the principles of
delivery herein laid down seems to retard your fluency. For a time, this
will be inevitable. While you are working for proper inflection, for
instance, inflection will be demanding your first thoughts, and the flow
of your speech, for the time being, will be secondary. This warning,
however, is strictly for 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 it is to say X, Y, Z--habit has
established the order. Just so you must master the laws of efficiency in
speaking until it is a second nature for you to speak correctly rather
than otherwise. A beginner at the piano has a great deal of trouble with
the mechanics of playing, but as time goes on his fingers become trained
and almost instinctively wander over the keys correctly. As an
inexperienced speaker you will find a great deal of difficulty at first
in putting principles into practise, for you will be scared, like the
young swimmer, and make some