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The Mechanics and Rhetoric of Conversation - part 10

No generalizer can be a good conversationalist. A person who habitually talks in such terms as, "They live in a very large house," "That's a very expensive restaurant," "Moth­er's back yard is full of flowers," is a generalizer. He will not be very interesting, and if he talks much he will be flat or tiresome. But if he says, "They live in a nine-room, three-story house," "The cheapest dinner in Holway's restaurant is $3.00," "Mother's back yard has fifteen varieties of flowers, from asters to snapdragons," he is a specifier. He then talks like one who has been there, like one who knows. He there­fore talks like one with authority. We learn something from him. He is interesting. People noticed and said of our Lord that He talked as one with authority. That wasn't only be­cause Jesus was God. Even God in talking to man has to follow the principles of rhetoric to be interesting, and Jesus did. When He wanted to convince people that a kindly Providence sees everything, He cites the "lilies of the field" as growing without toiling or spinning. Another time, de­claring that "any sound tree will bear good fruit," He asks specifically, "Can grapes be plucked from briers, or figs from thistles?" Again, urging His hearers to "lay up treasure for yourselves in heaven," He does not generalize heaven as a safe and secure place but as one "where there is no moth or rust to consume it" (Matt. 6 and 7).

A general sentence such as "Mother's back yard is full of flowers" is suitable only as a topic sentence, as embracing specific examples which preceded or better which will follow. It ought to have at least three examples or proofs or descriptions of these flowers in detail. Shakespeare, in the King Lear citation given above, opens his enumeration of crows, samphire gatherer, and the fishermen with the generalized or topical sentence, "How fearful and dizzy 'tis to cast one's eye so low!" Jesus, too, in His discussion of Providence be­gins with a fairly generalized statement, "do not be solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on." One should fix in one's mind that general­ized statements are justifiable only as the caps or binders of clusters of statements proving or explaining them. As such topic sentences, they are good and necessary. But without such a cluster, a generalized statement is a loose lead to dullness. They are the mark of the windbag and the bore. You should make a conscious effort to count things and to measure them in your speech. Resolve, for example, never to say few if you can say three, never animal if you can say cat, never went if you can say ran, never entertained if you can say yodled. This resolve will prove a marvelous tonic to your whole conversational personality. You will begin to count and measure things. Your vocabulary will increase magically, and will take on life and color and realism. You will begin to learn the names of trees, birds, and flowers, of tools and machines, in short, of everything in more types and classes. When you attend a rally or a play, you will auto­matically estimate by rows and seats how many people are there. Then when you talk about it you will not say lamely that a "lot of people" were there, but you will say that you calculated 850. In this way, assuming that you ever keep with you that common sense without which nothing is a virtue, you will become an increasingly more interesting conversationalist. You will also be a more interesting per­son — mainly because you will be a more interested one.

In short, if you realize that good rhetoric demands that you be specific, a more sparkling personality will be your reward. To a greater or lesser degree, that goes for all the points of this chapter — subordinating ideas properly, em­ploying figurative turns of expression, taking pride in good usage and pronunciation, and avoiding dictional idiosyncra­sies. Conversation is your most continual social activity. Its tool is language — grammar, rhetoric, words. You must de­termine to handle all three as well as you can. The mere will to do so — the steady interest in those matters — will in itself go a long way toward making you talk so that others will like to hear you. These matters, along with those to follow, will make people not only like to hear you talk, but like to hear you talk even more than they like to hear themselves talk.

Related terms include speak phrases and how to improve your public speaking.