Lectures and Speeches

Classroom lectures are generally formal in style, but the manner of delivery may differ (markedly) from one lecture to another. In a university class the size of the audience has a great deal of influence on the style of the lecture. If the audience of a small group — up to about 10, for example — the speaker is likely to become rather informal; in large lecture halls with a hundred or more students present, he will speak quite differently. If the professor expects the students to make notes, he will speak more slowly and leave more pauses.

Speeches (orations, public addresses) are quite formal in style even though here and there they may use slang or other informal speech patterns for special effect. The delivery of speeches is quite distinctive. The pitch of the speaker’s voice tends to be higher than his normal speaking range, and the regular intonation patterns of the language are sometimes exaggerated and even distorted.

These devices were developed originally, of course, so that the speaker could be understood by large numbers of people who might be some distance away from him. With modern amplification devices, these speech patterns are no longer as necessary as they used to be, but public speakers still use them, probably because they feel that the audience expects them to. The speech would not seem very important if it was read without extra emphasis, without unusual pitches and intonation patterns, without the pauses and other devices that are characteristic of the oratorial style.

Lectures

1. You should notice the large amount of attention which the lecturer pays to the organization and presentation of his material. He spends a considerable amount of time on telling his audience what he is going to say, and how he is going to say it, and also reminding them of where he has got to, how he wishes them to take some of his points.

2. Lecturers have the choice of reading the whole of what they wish to say from the script, or of speaking with the aid of a set of notes. They may in addition to these two possibilities abandon any kind of written form whatsoever and speak entirely without notes.

3. No public speech is ever completely spontaneous, in the manner of conversation, since all such speeches, even those in which no notes are used, will have been to some extent prepared in advance.

4. Another common influence on public speakers comes from the fact that, if they are to do their job properly, they must take into account what they sound like to the audience. Certain requirements of clarity and audibility are difficult to escape, and the need to quite understanding by means of careful use of pause and intonation — what is usually called “timing” and “phrasing” — nearly always has some effects on the language use.

5. This attempt to control sound may be seen as a result of trying also to control the audience — or at least their attention. Another result of audience control is to be seen in the tendency to adopt “rhetorical” forms of speech, in which the listeners are addressed or questioned directly so as to persuade them that they are in contact with the speakers and to get them more readily round to his way of thinking. Another effective tool of controling the audience is the use of direct address.

6. The language of public speaking is often a language of addition. Extra facts and extra arguments are tagged on to those that have gone before — frequently in a similar grammatical form — so that a speaker may make point clearer by adding detail or more emphatic or persuasive by repeating it in a slightly different way.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1292