For the mood or general "atmosphere":
Anything you deem suitable in Activity 8 in EXERCISE - Connotation.
An old, deserted house
Your birthplace as you saw it in manhood
The view from an eminence
A city as seen from a roof garden by night
Your mother's Bible
A barnyard scene
The lonely old negro at the supper table
A new immigrant gazing out upon the ocean he has crossed
The downtown section at closing hour
A scene of quietude
A scene of bustle and confusion
A richly colored scene
A scene of dejection
A scene of wild enthusiasm
A scene of dulness or stagnation.
With attention to homely detail:
The old living-room
My aunt's dresses
Barker's riding-horse
The business street of the village
A cabin in the mountains
The office of a man approaching bankruptcy
The Potters' backyard
The second-hand store
The ugliest man.
For general accuracy and vividness:
The organ-grinder
The signs of an approaching storm
The arrival of the train
Mail-time at the village post office
The crowd at the auction
The old fishing-boat
A country fair (or a circus)
The inside of a theater (or a church)
The funeral procession
The political rally
The choir.
<4. Mastery through Adapting Discourse to Audience>
For convenience, we have heretofore assumed that ideas and emotions,
together with such expression of them as shall be in itself adequate and
faithful, comprise the sole elements that have to be reckoned with in the
use of words in combination. But as you go out into life you will find
that these things, however complete they may seem, are not in practice
sufficient. Another factor--the human--must have its place in our
equation. You do not speak or write in a vacuum. Your object, your
ultimate object at least, in building up your vocabulary is to address men
and women; and among men and women the varieties of training, of stations,
of outlooks, of sentiments, of prejudices, of caprices are infinite. To
gain an unbiased hearing you must take persistent cognizance of flesh and
blood.
In adapting discourse to audience you must have a supple and attentive
mind and an impressionable 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
narration you must vivify emotional torpor; but lest in your efforts to
inveigle boredom you yourself should induce it, you must have a wary eye
for signals of distress.