Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [58]
Both you and your audience benefit from the use of pauses. They enable your listeners to follow the logical progression of your units of thought. Significant ideas need breathing space and should not be crowded too closely together.
Strategically placed pauses cause the audience to wait expectantly for your next statement. They help you to hold the attention of your audience.
If you get applause to a certain remark in your speech, be sure to pause long enough for it to die down before beginning your next sentence. Otherwise the audience may miss the beginning of the sentence, which can be very irritating. All of us have experienced this during a movie or play punctuated by laughter from the audience.
Mark pauses on your manuscript by using single, double, and triple slashes to indicate the length of the pause. A triple slash at the end of a paragraph clearly gives you time to take a breath.
Brevity. The Gettysburg Address is one of the best-known and oftenquoted speeches in the English language. Delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on the site of a battlefield on November 19, 1863, its purpose was to dedicate a portion of the site to a cemetery. Lincoln wrote two similar versions of the speech before giving it that day, and he wrote down three other versions—all very similar—after the speech.
What many people forget, however, is that despite its impact, the Gettysburg Address is actually a very short speech—only ten sentences long. The following version of the speech is the fifth, and last, version that Lincoln hand wrote of the speech. It is said to be the closest to the one that he actually delivered that day on the battlefield:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In the address, Lincoln said that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” but that has obviously not been the case. History tells us that the main speaker at the dedication ceremonies, Edward Everett, wrote a letter to President Lincoln afterward saying: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
It is obvious, then, that brevity is a major key to a good speech. Nowadays we are conditioned by the media to receive our messages in a short span of time. We sometimes think we can learn all we want to know about the world in the first two minutes of a network news broadcast.
During a long evening, a nine-minute keynote speech is greatly appreciated. The speaker who drones on