The Art of Public Speaking

This is Dale Carnegie two decades before How to Win Friends and Influence People, writing with the editor and teacher J. Berg Esenwein. Published in 1915, it is a full course rather than a pep talk, built out of what Carnegie was learning in front of real classes.

It opens on the question his students kept asking, which is still the question: how do I stop being afraid up there. His answer is that the fear is normal, that it is not a verdict on your ability, and that it is trained away by doing the thing rather than by feeling differently about it.

What is in the book

The chapters are a syllabus, not a set of themes: Acquiring Confidence Before an Audience, The Sin of Monotony, Efficiency Through Emphasis and Subordination, Change of Pitch, Change of Pace, Pause and Power, Inflection, Concentration in Delivery, Force.

That is the book's real value. It breaks speaking into parts you can rehearse separately. Monotony is treated as a fault with specific cures. Pause is treated as an instrument, not an accident. Emphasis is a decision about which words carry the sentence, made in advance.

Underneath the mechanics is a plain insistence on having something to say. Most bad speaking, in their account, is a delivery problem downstream of an empty argument, and no amount of gesture work fixes that.

And a correction to the beginner's assumption: the audience is not against you. They arrived wanting you to do well. Speaking to that fact changes what you do with your hands and with your first sentence.

It comes with exercises and passages to work aloud, which is exactly the material a coach can hand you one at a time and wait on.

Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein

Carnegie was in his twenties here, teaching speaking classes at the YMCA and working out in public what would eventually make him famous. Esenwein was an established editor and teacher of writing, and the scholarly scaffolding is largely his.

The pairing is why the book holds up better than most of its era. It has Carnegie's directness about nerve and Esenwein's discipline about craft, and it quotes widely, from Pittenger to the orators of the previous century, without ever losing the classroom voice.