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Public Speaking:Comparison to promote Clearness.
Clearness is sacrosanct in public speaking and cannot be do away with. And to achieve this, the comparison is a foolproof device to use. Similar things are compared together says a Yoruba proverb. The use of comparison helps a lot in the achievement of clearness in public speech making. It boosts the clarity of an idea. Dale Carnegie has this to say in his book entitled Public Speaking:
As to clearness: do not underestimate the importance of it or the difficulty. I once heard a certain Irish poet give an evening of reading from his poems. Not ten percent of the audience, half the time, knew what he was talking about. Many talkers, both in public and private, are a lot like that.
When I discussed the essentials of public speaking with Sir Oliver Lodge, a man who had been lecturing to university classes and to the public for forty years, he emphasized most of all the importance, first, of knowledge and preparation; second, of " taking good pains to be clear".
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>General Von Moltke, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussia war, said to his officers:" Remember, gentlemen, that any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood."
Napoleon recognized the same danger. His most emphatic and oft-reiterated instruction to his secretaries was: "Be clear! Be clear!"
And when you talk on a subject strange to your hearer or hearers, can you hope that they will understand you any more readily than people understood the Master? Hardly. So what can we do about it? What did he do when confronted with a similar situation? Solved it most simply and naturally imaginable: described the things people did not know by likening them to things they did know. The kingdom of Heaven...what would it be like? How could those untutored peasants of Palestine know? So Christ described it in terms of objects and actions with which they were already familiar:The kingdom of Heaven is likened unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was cast into the sea...
That was lucid; they could understand that. The housewives in the audience were using leaven every week; the fishermen were casting their nets into the sea daily; the merchants were dealing in pearls.
And how did David make clear the watchfulness and loving-kindness of Jehovah?
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters...
Green grazing grounds in that almost barren country... still waters where the sheep could drink- those pastoral people could understand that.
Here is a rather striking and half- amusing example of the use of this principle: some missionaries were translating the Bible into the dialect of a tribe living near-equatorial Africa. They progressed to the verse: "Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. " How were they to translate that? Literally? Meaningless. Absurd. The natives had never shoveled snow away on a February morning. They did not even have a word for snow. They could not have told the difference between snow and coal tar; but they had climbed coconut trees many times and shaken down a few nuts; so the missionaries likened the unknown to the known and changed the verse to read: "Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as the meat of a coconut."Under the cicircularces, it would be hard to improve on that, wouldn't it?
An excerpt from Dale Carnegie tells you how to develop self-confidence and influence people by Public Speaking.
Be clear! Be clear!
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