sepulchral, and tremulous.

Your articulation should be clear, distinct, and correct. Avoid
carelessness, lifelessness, mumbling, weakness, and exaggeration.

Your pronunciation should be clear-cut and accurate. Avoid mouthing,
lisping, hesitation, stammering, pedantry, omission of syllables, and
suppression of final consonants.

Your delivery in public speaking should be simple, sincere, natural,
varied, magnetic, earnest, forceful, attractive, energetic, animated,
sympathetic, authoritative, dignified, direct, impressive, vivid,
convincing, persuasive, zealous, enthusiastic, and inspiring. Avoid that
which is timid, familiar, violent, cold, indifferent, unreal,
artificial, dull, sing-song, hesitating, feeble, unconvincing,
apathetic, monotonous, pompous, formal, arbitrary, flippant,
ostentatious, drawling, or languid.

Your gesture should be graceful, appropriate, free, forceful, and
natural. Avoid all gesture which is unmeaning, angular, abrupt,
constrained, stilted, or amateurish.

Your facial expression should be varied, appropriate, pleasing, and
impassioned. Avoid the unpleasant, immobile, and unvaried.

Let your standing position be manly, erect, easy, forceful, and
impressive. Avoid that which is weak, shifting, stiff, inactive, and
ungainly.

THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN SPEAKING

There is a well-defined prejudice against the importation of anything
"theatrical" into the pulpit. The art of the actor is fundamentally
different from the work of the preacher. At best the actor but
represents, imitates, pretends, acts. The actor seems; the preacher is.

It is to be feared, however, that this prejudice has narrowed many
preachers down to a pulpit style almost devoid of warmth and action. In
their endeavor to avoid the dramatic and sensational, they have refined
and subdued many of their most natural and effective means of
expression. The function of preaching is not only to impart, but to
persuade; and persuasion demands something more than an easy
conversational style, an intellectual statement of facts, or the reading
of a written message. The speaker must show in face, in eye, in arm, in
the whole animated man, that he, himself, is moved, before he can hope
successfully to persuade and inspire others.

The modified movements of ordinary conversation do not fulfil all the
requirements of the preacher. These are necessary and adequate for the
groundwork of the sermon, but for the supreme heights o