tive
style, a style marked by brief, pungent, witty, and humorous comparisons
and characterizations, is a wonderful resource for all kinds of platform
work.

_Description may be direct._ This statement is plain enough without
exposition. Use your own judgment as to whether in picturing you had
better proceed from a general view to the details, or first give the
details and thus build up the general picture, but by all means BE
BRIEF.

Note the vivid compactness of these delineations from Washington
Irving's "Knickerbocker:"

He was a short, square, brawny old gentleman, with a double
chin, a mastiff mouth, and a broad copper nose, which was
supposed in those days to have acquired its fiery hue from the
constant neighborhood of his tobacco pipe.

He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five
inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of
such stupendous dimensions, that Dame Nature, with all her sex's
ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable
of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and
settled it firmly on the top of his backbone, just between the
shoulders. His body was of an oblong form, particularly
capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordered by Providence,
seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to
the idle labor of walking.

The foregoing is too long for the platform, but it is so good-humored,
so full of delightful exaggeration, that it may well serve as a model
of humorous character picturing, for here one inevitably sees the inner
man in the outer.

Direct description for platform use may be made vivid by the _sparing_
use of the "historical present." The following dramatic passage,
accompanied by the most lively action, has lingered in the mind for
thirty years after hearing Dr. T. De Witt Talmage lecture on "Big
Blunders." The crack of the bat sounds clear even today:

Get ready the bats and take your positions. Now, give us the
ball. Too low. Don't strike. Too high. Don't strike. There it
comes like lightning. Strike! Away it soars! Higher! Higher!
Run! Another base! Faster! Faster! Good! All around at one
stroke!

Observe the remarkable way in which the lecturer fused speaker,
audience, spectators, and players into one excited, ecstatic whole--just
as you have found yourself starting forward in your seat at the delivery