An “Impromptu” Repertoire

Most speakers avoid these embarrassments. At an early stage they develop a reliable repertoire of appropriate responses to use when called upon to make a few impromptu remarks-a sort of emergency kit. A speaker addressing the parents of a squirming lot of little live why-ers proves he knows parents as well as he understands kids. He urges that little peoples’ problems are as big to them as those of the biggest business man in town.

This touch of truth came to light when Marilyn was recuperating from pneumonia. Her first-grade assignments taxed her depleted strength and when she came home for lunch that first day back at school, she flopped down on the sofa in an attitude of utter fatigue. “If Daddy thinks he has to work hard, he should be in the first grade!”

Preparedness Is Important

Good speakers are ever prepared to talk about weather-as everyone’s heard so often, whether we like it or not, we’ll always have weather. On a wintry morning when someone says, “Oh what a beautiful snow” the beauty of it depends on whether you look at it or have to shovel it.

The changing seasons that chase each other around the calendar affect different people in different ways. To some the melancholy days of Fall are fraught with forebodings of heavy storms and slate gray skies; they heed the swarming starlings, chill to misty mornings, and detest the putrid smell of frost-bitten cabbage forgotten in the field. The rustling leaves on their lawns are a nuisance, and cornstalk teepees in the countryside remind them of gaunt ghosts.

Other people are the other extreme: They welcome Jack Frost as the fellow who turns the sumac to crimson and puts a golden glow on the maple trees. Honkers winging southward are music to their ears, and they thrill to the tang in the autumn air … to them smoldering leaf-fires are like incense, and ripe pumpkins amid the cornfield teepees are harbingers of a happy harvest.

Whether we like it or not, the weather never fails to open a wide variety of viewpoints, as the foregoing samples prove.

Tags: public speaking

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