The Essentials of Effective Gesture for Students of Public Speaking (Classic Reprint)

It is generally admitted that good gestures help to vitalize, illuminate, and emphasize verbal expression. And if students of the art of speech-making can be led to understand the underlying principles of gesture, and the reasons for its expressiveness, a notable improvement of their style of delivery can be effected. In our instruction and our textbooks dealing viith this subject there has been a tendency to inform the student, ex cathedra, that he should use such and such a gesture on this and that passage. In thus performing the function of trainers only, we get more or less mechanical results on the passages in question, but we do not give the insight which enables the student to apply the gestures to similar or analogous ideas wherever expressed. To tell him, for example, that thousands of acres may be indicated by a broad sweep of the hand is surely less beneficial than to lead him to understand that the passage of the hand through space conveys to the audience the idea of extent.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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