Delight and Power in Speech: A Universal Dramatic Reader

Speech is one of God’s greatest gifts to man, yet, comparatively speaking, how few there are whose speech is pleasing to hear, clear and understandable, impressive and stimulative to action.
From the cradle to the grave every person, perforce, uses speech, just as he eats, breathes, drinks, sleeps. It is one of the important, ever exercised functions of life. Upon it all our social, business and professional intercourse is based. Without it, life as we know it, would be impossible. With it, developed to its natural, normal, proper, and readily attainable efficiency, there are few limits to what man may aspire to attain.
Recognizing to the full the truth of the aphorism that “the things we enjoy doing are the things we do best,” it is the purpose of this book so to present its subject as to create in its readers a firm resolve to so thoroughly enjoy good reading that they will do it well.
The aim is twofold: first, to stimulate a natural desire on the part of the student for the proper use of voice and body in the oral interpretation of literature; and second, to present a natural and practical scheme for the attainment of this end.
After a number of years of experience and observation the authors have come to believe that when even the most diffident pupil has once had aroused in him a real enjoyment in the acts of speaking and reading aloud, he is destined to become not only an intelligent, but an intelligible reader.
It is no longer necessary to argue for the recognition of vocal expression as a worthy and definite part of the curriculum of High School and College. Training in the spoken word is to-day, as never before, looked upon as a prerequisite to professional and business success. Henry Ward Beecher, speaking of the rightful place of speech culture, says:
A living force that brings to itself all the resources of the imagination, all the inspirations of feeling, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in posture, in the whole animated man, is in strict analogy with the divine thought and the divine arrangement ... and so regarded, it should take its place among the highest departments of education.
The majority of mankind, however, seems to feel that beautiful, powerful, and effective speech or the ability to read well and acceptably is the gift or attainment of the chosen few. Nothing can be further from the fact. Beauty is the normal condition in the universe in every realm of nature, and is attained by the simple effort of each thing to express itself in natural and spontaneous fashion. Likewise, clear, impressive, delight-giving, thought-provoking speech, and the power to read well are as easy to attain, and may be obtained in the same natural, spontaneous, unaffected manner.