pressionable and swiftly responsive temperament as well as a
wide, accurate, and flexible vocabulary. Unless you are a fool, a zealot,
or an incorrigible adventurer, you will not broach a subject at all to
which your hearers feel absolute indifference or hostility. Normally you
should pick a subject capable of interesting them. In presenting it you
should pay heed to both your matter and your manner. You should emphasize
for your listeners those aspects of the subject which they will most
respond to or most need to hear, whether or not the phases be such as you
would emphasize with other auditors. You should also speak in the fashion
you deem most effective with them, whether or not it be one to which your
own natural instincts prompt you.

Let us say you are discussing conditions in Europe. You must speak in one
way to the man who has traveled and in an entirely different way to the
man who has never gone abroad--in one way to the well-read man, in an
entirely different way to the ignoramus. Let us say you are discussing
urban life, urban problems. You must speak in one way to the man who lives
in the city, in another to the man who lives in the country. Let us say
you are discussing the labor problem. You must speak in one way to
employers, in another to employees, possibly in a third to men thrown out
of jobs, possibly in a fourth to the general public. Let us say you are
discussing education, or literature, or social tendencies, or mechanical
principles or processes, or some great enterprise or movement. You must
speak in one way to cultivated hearers and in another to men in the
street, and if you are a specialist addressing specialists, you will cut
the garment of your discourse to their particular measure.

The same principle holds regardless of whether you expound, analyze,
argue, recount, or describe. You must always keep a finger on the mental
or emotional pulse of those whom you address. But your problem varies
slightly with the form of discourse you adopt. In explanation, analysis,
and argument the chief barriers you encounter are likely to be those of
the mind; you must make due allowance for the intellectual limitations of
your auditors, though many who have capacity enough may for some cause or
other be unreceptive to ideas. In description you must reckon with the
imaginative faculty, with the possibility that your hearers cannot
visualize what you tell them--and you must make your words brief. In
narrati