friends i was once giving a sermon in a church and a woman got up with her crying child really shrieking and left the church and i said madam it's all right so the child isn't bothering me she says i know but you're bothering the child and i was giving a talk in canada once on a sunday and i noticed that in the theater there were a number of people men taking up a collection and when they finally came up to the front row where i could see them very well i leaned over and i said
to one of them i said what's the idea of taking up a collection during this lecture he said to get better speakers for next year [Music] so i am not presenting myself as a model to you on how to talk it's just merely that there have been so many letters coming to me asking me to give a few suggestions that i will give them to you they are only personal they may not apply to everyone but i will give them to you for what they are worth if i can talk now i certainly couldn't always
talk there came a turning point in my life it was in college when i was a freshman i was on the debating team which was in the college that i attended a great honor because they put a tremendous premium on debating i thought i was good because after all i was picked as a freshman i had to be good the night before the debate with notre dame university the coach of our debating team father bergen called me over to his office and he said you are the worst talker we've ever had in this college that
was a terrible shock to me i said well if i'm so terrible why did you pick me on the team he said because you can think not because you can talk but he said you're going to learn to talk before before you leave this room take a paragraph out of that speech any paragraph you like i remember we were talking on the merchant marine i'll never forget the paragraph began i think it needs no argument to prove and so forth so he said stand up there against the wall which i did now he said go
over that paragraph the end of it he said do you see your mistake i said no go over it again went over one hour two hours two hours and a half i was dead so was he [Music] and every two or three minutes when i finished it he would say do you see your mistake i said no but being naturally quick after two hours and a half i saw it he said do you see your mistake i said yes i think i do i'm not natural he said that's right that's all and he dismissed me
you notice how often speakers as soon as they get up in a platform or ministers or priests in the pulpit everything changes their voice changes their attitudes their poses i think many prayers that we say are we not talking to god we're talking to an audience particularly prayers at banquets inaugurations and so forth and we put on artificial poses oh god we ask thee to send down upon us thy benediction thy blessing upon the sailors who are at sea the merchants at their counting table the lawyers at their bar that's not the way people talk
so being natural and preparing a talk what would be some suggestions now the way i prepare a talk is not perhaps the way everyone would want to do it but i can only give you my way in order to prepare a talk one must do a tremendous amount of reading each one of these telecasts of mine would represent between 20 and 40 hours of study when i get through what have i got nothing but a bits of yellow pages you know i think i have one in my pocket but before i show it to you
i will tell you what i do i study i do research and i begin to understand the subject then when it gets into my head i begin to write out points generally just three or four points that i'm going to talk about i will only write out the heading and then i will tear up the paper and then rethink what i was saying so that at when i prepare a telecast there must be uh oh 20 30 to maybe 100 pages that are torn up and then the closer i get to the end the smaller
the pages are this is this telecast and i brought it out here not because i'm going to refer to it but just simply because it shows you the the points how small the points are and by by doing a tremendous amount of study the mind creates an atmosphere for the talk there is much more air around about us than ever gets into the lung there's more food at the table than ever gets into our stomach there are more things to see in nature than ever comes into the eye and so when one rises to give
a talk once you have an atmosphere a certain a certain ambient knowledge roundabout that one can pull in this idea or that as it were from the air while you're talking so that instead of writing out the speech word for word beforehand and then memorizing it like this one thinks that from the head out that's the reason you tear up the paper so you don't have any information you have to think it then you write down the ideas again remember the time you get up to talk you've already given the speech 10 or 15 times
and incidentally it isn't a bad idea sometimes to talk out loud if you can find a place in this day and age where you can walk and talk out loud without being counted crazy how often for example students are asked to to explain something they think they know the lesson when they get up it's not there why because they they they were consecrated and dedicated to a dead page never went through their mind sometimes teachers are just textbooks wired for sound and and studying is nothing but but what is in print passing from the mind
of the book to the notebook of the teacher or rather from the notebook of the teacher to the notebook of the student without passing through the mind of either now this method of preparation is not um it's hard it's very much easier to write something out and then to learn it than to do it this way sometimes if you do not feel well when you're giving a telecast or a lecture thoughts do not come you cannot always recall exactly what you had in your mind but at any rate there's a spontaneity that's what people like
even the mistakes you make now one of the reasons for example why people like to have me draw is because everybody in the audience can draw better than i can they feel they're far superior and rightly so so if i if i make a mistake in talking fine that's good they say i could do it just as well as that and they can this method while it's harder and is a wonderful preparation for for uh absorbing knowledge has difficulties one difficulty is that there are some people who give speeches who must write them out for
example the president of the united states has to have a speech as written because every word is important then two there are some things that are not worth learning john barrymore for example who committed would commit all the lines of shakespeare by heart but when he played in in comedies and cheap movies and so forth he absolutely refused to learn anything he wanted helps outside now that's why people on television have to have aids that are outside i do not use any any kind of aid on the outside if i read anything i i have
it written out now there are there are two main props that are used in television and the first prop is what is called an idiot card an idiot card is something that is written out so that you'll not forget it now just suppose i were teaching you mathematics now i would be i would be reading off this idiot card and i would say to this vast television audience two plus two equals four two plus one equals three three plus three equals six see i don't forget it that way wonderful isn't it now you can um
thank you for the idiot card it was not an idiot that held it's only the card that's an idiot and uh it's impossible for people who are constantly appearing example on television to to uh to study their lines or their commercials and so they they have to have them written out on these cards but you can always tell if you just look closely at anybody who's using an idiot card this is generally the way so do not do not be hard on them if i were saying something that was not worth committing to study i
certainly would use one too now there's another prop which is better and that is what is called a teleprompter and a teleprompter will have a whole speech on it example when you hear people giving speeches on television 999 out of a thousand are using a teleprompter if they do not have the paper before them many of the commercials which you hear are written on teleprompters now teleprompter rose i'm sorry i i was watching his elephant show once where the telephone teller promptly got caught [Music] and that's kind of hard now for example if i were
using a teleprompter and i didn't know my lines now this is exactly what i would have written out my name is bishop fulton j sheen my address is 366 fifth avenue new york see then i don't forget now this is the teleprompter these are some of the aids that are used in television and television simply could not exist without them and they are helpful too simply because one is uh one does have to forget many times you're standing before a television camera i i momentarily i can't think of the next point well i'll throw in
a story or something till it comes back to me you don't know it but i do i don't get too embarrassed i don't get flustered because i can't remember it i remember i was giving a talk once in ireland at the eucharistic congress i forgot when it was sometime a long time ago if there was ever a time in my life i wanted to do well it was then and i was reciting a poem a poem that i know just as well as i know the our father there's a poem written by an irishman joseph
mary plunkett and the poem was i see his blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of his eyes his body gleams amid eternal snows his tears fall from the skies i see his face in every flower the thunder and the singing of the birds about his voice and carven by his power rocks are his written words and i forgot forgot the next line the reason i forgot was because i had said something before that seemed to the audience seemed to have taken politically i didn't want it to have political significance so while
i was reciting this poem i was giving myself an intellectual spanking and i spanked myself so hard then when i got to the ninth line of this poem i forgot and i said to the art i forgot well tens is a tremendous crowd there are tens of thousands of jaws dropped in disappointment and when an irish jaw drops it collapses so i had to get myself out of the difficulty there came to me then a line of of uh patrick henry not the one that you know patrick henry also said something else he said when
you're in difficulty in in a narration throw yourself into the middle of a sentence and trust a god almighty to get you to the other end and so i began i didn't know what i was going to say but i start i said i'm glad i forgot so i didn't know how i was going to continue so i started again if i had ever wished to have forgotten anything so i thought i'd give myself another jump on the springing board if i had ever prayed or forgotten anything i should have prayed to have forgotten these
lines of joseph mary plunkett i think there's beautiful symbolism in their forgetfulness and that symbolism is that standing on the anvil of ireland's soil one should be able to hammer and forge out the sparks of his own poetry and not be dependent upon a magnanimous soul like joseph mary plunkett i got no credit for it afterwards because the audience said that was a great trick pretending you forgot it is always well and two to be prepared for such unexpected moments when you do forget and even better still when you're at a banquet and called upon
to give a talk and you have to begin with something that is not too heavy that one should always begin with something that's not too heavy for example you just simply cannot begin a speech by saying ladies and gentlemen the occipital frontalis the complexity convolution of the metaphorically victory are in pelvis it's a little too serious you have to start with something that's common to the audience now i think the best story of all for being called upon to talk without preparation and unexpectedly was the delightful story of gk chesterton he was called on he
said he said during the days of the persecution of the christians two christians were out in the coliseum and some lions that had been released for 12 days has been star for 12 days were released in their cages they bounded out across the flavian sands were about to precipitate themselves upon the poor christians when the christians reached out their arms put them around the lion's neck and began to say something in the lion's ear well the emperor was furious he came for blood not comedy because the lions went back again to their cages without touching
the christians so the emperor being furious ordered other lions that had been starved for four weeks released they bounded out after their prey were about to precipitate themselves upon the christians and the christians reached out their arms put them around the lion's neck whispered something in the lion's ear and the lions left them and went back again to their cages the emperor sent for the christians what are you doing to my starving lions nothing nothing but whispering something but what do you whisper the christian said we say after this meal you have to give a
speech so a preparation is is the most important part of the talk and then as regards delivery what is important is sincerity meaning what you say children are the best judges of anything that's heard on television i do not mean dramas where there's an artificial emotional interest created but children who may not understand what is being said they know whether the speaker is sincere or not incidentally that's a good word from sincere the um when the romans put up their many marble columns in their temples and their courts they sometimes would find marble that had
a flaw in it so they would fill it up with wax and color it wax in latin is chera if they found a perfect marble that had no need of artificial filling then it was called cna in latin means without without wax or sincere this is about the only suggestion that i would give for delivery one just simply feels what's in his heart that's all out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh and one must not be too long it's always better to have an audience say i wished he talked longer than to
have them say he had three good chances to quit and then to in the communication of any idea the secret of a of a good talk is the secret of fire fire has two qualities heat and light the light corresponds to the truth the heat corresponds to the zeal to the passion to the fire and the fire and the passion come always from the truth when one is on fire with anything and really believes in it all the words come out naturally and above all things else the making of an art or two is really
on his knees because the power to make an audience feel what you're saying does not come just from these fires it comes from fires that have been stolen from heaven and given to the speaker this is influence this is power fulton j sheen is indeed a man for all seasons he walked a paced beat allowing us to glimpse his nature and ponder its worth and to enjoy its presence bishop sheen authored over 90 books he broadcast countless radio and television programs and ministered in many parts of the world to people of every belief as he
said many times it is not a unity of religion we plead for but a unity of religious people we may not be able to meet in the same pew but we can meet on our knees the bishop wrote 94 books recorded countless radio shows and appeared on hundreds of network and syndicated television programs his legacy is a treasure of joy that transcends time and helps us to believe that truly life is worth living you
