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Mark Twain's Speechmaking Strategy

From "How Mark Twain Solved the Speechmaker's Dilemma" by Lydel Sims

Most Americans recognize Mark Twain as the author of such classics as Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur=s Court. But Twain in his own time was probably almost as well known for his great ability as a speaker. One of his secrets suggests why this is so.

The schoolboy in the old story explained the technique nicely. Strategy, he wrote, means that when you run out of bullets you keep on firing. It hasn't caught on in military circles, but speechmakers have been practicing that kind of strategy for generations.

Consider the problem:

You're going to a sale conference, a convention, a testimonial dinner, a meeting of department heads. You're scheduled to speak or you know you'll be called on. So you organize your thoughts scribble notes on a piece of paper... and worry.

You worry, because like all good speakers you want people to believe the words just flow out-all the humor, the motivation, the five, the matchless grasp of detail, the fresh and sparkling anecdotes.

But speakers who hold audiences in the palm of their hand don't speak from notes. Are you going to pause and consult those plagued notes, this admitting mere mortality? or are you going wing it and risk forgetting your best story omitting your most important point? And if you run out of ammunition, are you going to try to keep on firing?

Mark Twain faced that very same dilemma and solved it becoming one of the most successful speakers in America's history.

In his early days on the lecture circuit, Mark Twain worked out a solution to the speechmaker's dilemma by trial and error, but he didn't explain it until years later in a little-known essay that was published after his death. The system was so good, he testified that a quarter-century after he had given a lecture he could remember the whole thing by a single act of recall.

You have Twain's posthumous guarantee that it'll work for you. When he first began his speaking career, Twain recalled, he used a full page of notes to keep from getting mixed up. He would write down the beginnings of key sentences, to take him from one point to another and to protect him from skipping. For a typical evenings's lecture, he would write and memorize 11 key beginnings.

The plan failed. Twain would remember the sentences, all right but forget their order. He would have to stop consult his notes, and thereby spoil the spontaneous effect of the whole speech.

Twain then decided to memorize not only his key sentences, but also the first letter of each sentence. This initial-letter method did not work either. Not even when as he solemnly alleged, he cut the number of letters to 10 and inked them on his fingernails.

I kept track of the fingers for a while, he wrote in his essay, them I lost it, and after that I was never quite sure which finger I used last.

He considered licking off the inked letters as he went along. People noticed he seemed more interested in his fingernails than his subject; one or two listeners would come up afterwards and ask what was wrong with his hands.

Then Mark Twain's great idea came-that it's hard to visualize letters, words and sentences, but picture are easy to recall. They take hold. They can make things stick . . . Especially if you draw them yourself.

Twain was no artist, mind you, but that didn't stop him. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, he reported, and they did the work of the 11 catch-sentences, and did ti perfectly.

Having once drawn the pictures, he found he could throw them away. He discovered (and you can test it for yourself) that, having once made a crude series of drawings he could recall their image at will.

He left us samples of three of those first six pictures, and they are pathetic things indeed by artistic standards. But they go the job done.

The first was a haystack with a wiggly line under it to represent a rattlesnake--that was to tell him to begin talking about ranch life in the West. Alongside it, he drew a few lines with what could just possibly be an umbrella and the Roman numeral II- that referred to a tale about a great wind that would strike Carson City at 2 o'clock every afternoon. Next, he drew a couple of jagged lines-lightning of course-telling him it was time to move on to the subject of weather in San Francisco, where the point as that there wasn't any lightning. Nor thunder either, he noted.

From that day, Twain was able to speak without notes, and the system never failed him. Each portion of his speech would be represented by a picture. He would draw them, all strung out in a row, then look at them and destroy them. When the time came to speak there was the row of images sharply in his mind

Twain observed you can even make last-minute notes based on the remarks of an earlier speaker. Just insert another figure in your set of images.

The magic of the Twain technique should be immediately obvious to the speaker who organizes remarks around anecdotes. Are you introducing your first point with a story about a nervous doctor in Dubuque? Draw the doctor. Are you following that with the principle that's best illustrated with the tale of the fellow who treed a wildcat? Draw a tree alongside the doctor. And so on.

The remarkable thing is that Twain's method can work just as well for concepts as it does for anecdotes. Sales must be increased? Draw a vertical arrow with a dollar sign. Something about productivity? A lopsided circle representing a wheel is sufficient. Research and development? Even you can draw what will be recognized-by you-as a mad scientist. And if you need figures, put them in the pictures, too, coming out of people's mouths, piled in pyramids, outlined in exclamation marks, lurking under bridges.

The wilder the image the easier it'll be to remember. And once you have your scrawls in sequence and take a good look, you're fixed. Instant memory.

Mark Twain didn't mention it, but there's one more thing you might do. When you reach the end of your drawings, hence the end of your speech, you could add one more-a drawing of an octagonal sign: STOP!

That would be smart strategy, for then you really are out of bullets. No need to keep on firing.

RETENTION Based on the passage, which of the following statements are True (T), False (F), or Not answerable (N)?

1.______ Twain left us a posthumous: (a) guarantee. (b) legend. (c) ghost story. (d) jibe.

2.______ Twain could recall a speech he had made: (a) while drunk. (b) in England.

3.______ To use notes is to admit: (a) nothing. (b) mere mortality. (c) cocky complacency.

4.______ The wider the image, the: (a) worse the speech. (b) easier it is to remember.

5.______ Twain liked to make his speeches seem: (a) fanciful. (b) spiteful. (c) significant.

6.______ One reason for using a system such as Twain=s is to: (a) move up the ladder.

DEFINITIONS Choose the definition from Column B that best matches each italicized word in Column A.