Public Speaking to Win!: The Original Formula to Speaking with Power by Dale Carnegie

Author:Dale Carnegie [CARNEGIE, DALE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gildan Media Corporation
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

How to Open a Talk

For some unfortunate reason, the novice often feels that he ought to be funny as a speaker. So he is inclined to open with a humorous story, especially if the occasion is an after-dinner affair. The chances are his stories don’t “click.” In the immortal language of Hamlet, they prove “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.”

In the difficult realm of speechmaking, what is more difficult, more rare, than the ability to make an audience laugh? Remember, it is seldom the story that is funny. It is the way it is told that makes it a success. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will fail woefully with the identical stories that made Mark Twain famous.

The second egregious blunder that the beginner is likely to make in his opening is this: He apologizes. “I am no speaker… I am not prepared to talk… I have nothing to say…” Don’t! Don’t! Why insult your audience by suggesting that you did not think them worth preparing for, that just any old thing you happened to have on the fire would be good enough to serve them? We don’t want to hear your apologies. We are there to be informed and interested–to be interested, remember that.

Arouse your audience’s curiosity with your first sentence–and you have their attention. An article in The Saturday Evening Post entitled “With the Gangsters,” began: “Are gangsters really organized? As a rule they are. How?” With ten words the writer announced his subject, told you something about it, and aroused your curiosity.

Everyone who aspires to speak in public ought to study the techniques that magazine writers use to immediately hook the reader’s interest. You can learn far more from them about how to open a speech than you can by studying collections of speeches.

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