HOW TO SPEAK HOW TO LISTEN by Mortimer J. Adler

• Writing and reading go together; so, too, speaking and listening. The members of each pair are obviously complementary.
• Some individuals may have native endowments that enable them to become better speakers than others, but training is required to bring such talent to full bloom. Likewise, skill in listening is either a native gift or it: must be acquired by training.
• How extraordinary is the fact that no effort is made anywhere in the whole educational process to help individuals learn how to listen well—at least well enough to close the circuit and make speech effective as a means of communication.
• One can improve one’s reading endlessly, by reading something over and over again.
• In writing, one is always able to revise and improve what one has written. No writer need pass on a piece of writing to someone else until he or she is satisfied that it is written as well as possible.
• Unlike writing, ongoing speech is generally unamendable. Any effort to take back what one has said while one is speaking often turns out to be more confusing than letting the deficiencies stand.
• A prepared speech is, of course, amendable before being delivered, as a piece of writing is. An impromptu or improvised speech is not.
• In contrast to writing and reading, which are usually solitary undertakings, speaking and listening are always social and cannot be otherwise. They always involve human confrontations.
• We speak to others, but when our speaking involves us also in listening to what they have to say, we are engaged in talking with them.
• Without communication, there can be no community. Human beings cannot form a community or share in a common life without communicating with one another.
• A lively and flourishing community of human beings requires that the social aspect of their speaking and listening be consummated rather than aborted.
• Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the three arts concerned with excellence in the use of language for the expression of thought and feeling.
• Practical persuasion in all its myriad forms is salesmanship.
• Rare is the person who can completely bypass the business of persuasion. Most of us, in our daily contacts, are involved in it most of the time.
• Establishing one’s character is the preliminary step in any attempt at persuasion.
• Of the three factors in persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logos—ethos always should come first.
• Unless you have established your credibility as a speaker and made yourself personally attractive to your listeners, you are not likely to sustain their attention, much less to persuade them to do what you wish. Only after they are persuaded to trust you, can they be persuaded by what you have to say about anything else.
• Whereas ethos consists in the establishment of the speaker’s credibility and credentials, his respectable and admirable character, pathos consists in arousing the passions of the listeners, getting their emotions running in the direction of the action to be taken.
• Reasons and arguments may be used to reinforce the drive of the passions, but reasons and arguments will have no force at all unless your listeners are already disposed emotionally to move in the direction that your reasons and arguments try to justify.
• Persuaders cannot always count on desires that are generally prevalent in their audiences and ready to be brought into play. Sometimes they must instil the very desire that they seek to satisfy with their product, their policy, or their candidate.
• Sometimes people have needs or wants that are dormant, needs or wants of which they are not fully aware.
• Above all, the persuader should avoid lengthy, involved, and intricate arguments.
• For the same reason that listening is more difficult than reading, lecturing is more difficult than writing. The reason is that both listening and speaking, unlike writing and reading, take place in a limited span of time and occur in an irreversible flow.
• The silent listener must catch on the fly what is being said. That imposes on the audience of a lecture the obligation to be persistently attentive.
• Each time the curtain goes up, no matter how many times it has gone up before for the lecturer, it should always seem like a new performance for the audience.
• The skill of lecturers in dramatizing the moments of discovery will draw listeners into the activity of discovering the truths to be learned. Without such activity on their part, there can be little genuine learning.
• The more abstract your argument becomes, the more remote from everyday experience it tends to be, the more it may appear “academic” to your audience, the more it is necessary for you to overcome the difficulties your audience is likely to have in listening to and following what you have to say.
• Most human beings, even those who have had sufficient schooling, find it difficult to rise above their imaginations or to think without appealing to vivid images and concrete examples. But abstractions—and often abstractions of a fairly high level—are indispensable to thinking about any important subject, certainly any subject that involves fundamental ideas.
• Never talk down to your audience about any subject. If you do so, they will quite rightly turn you off.
• It will not hurt if some of the things you say may be beyond their reach. It is much better for them to have the sense that they have succeeded in getting some enlightenment by their effort to reach up (even if they also have the sense that some things to be understood have escaped them) than it is for them to sit there feeling insulted by the patronizing manner in which you have talked down to them.
• The only lectures that are intellectually profitable for anyone to listen to are those that increase one’s knowledge and enlarge one’s understanding.
• Repetitions should be employed rather than avoided. They can be made more effective by reiterating the same point in a number of different ways.
• Some of the greatest orations ever delivered are marvellous to read, but were almost impossible to listen to when given.
• A speech that is to be delivered to an audience that comes to listen for the sake of learning can have greater length and more complex organization.
• Repetitions may be necessary to help the listeners discern where they have been, where they now are, and what they are about to move on to.
• The reason why repetitions should be avoided in writing (because readers can turn back to earlier pages to refresh their memory of a point merely referred to and not spelled out once again) does not apply to speaking. On the contrary, repetitions are needed precisely because the listener cannot turn back to something said earlier and hear it all over again. The speech is continually moving forward, and the speaker must repeat something said earlier if the listener needs to have it in mind in order to understand a point being made later.
• One word more about the length of a lecture. From thirty minutes to an hour is probably the most comfortable length for an audience. However, sometimes the substance to be covered requires a lecture to run longer than that. If that is the case, the speaker should find a breakpoint at which he can give the audience a short rest and then go on to the end.
• So far as possible, the speaker’s vocabulary should be designed so that it is generally consonant with the vocabulary of the audience.
• Keeping technical terms or terms of art to the minimum, and using common words with uncommon senses as infrequently as possible is, perhaps, the first rule of linguistic style in effective teaching by telling, especially in speaking to popular audiences.
• Jargon and esoteric language should be avoided at all costs.
• To fit all the parts of one’s speech into the allotted time and to fit them together in proper proportion to another, it is necessary to plot the organization of a lecture carefully and to have that plot written out and visibly present on the lectern as one speaks, just as most conductors of symphony orchestras turn the pages of the composer’s score that they have in front of them on the podium.
• It always amazes me what one can learn from delivering a speech, things one cannot discover in advance of that experience. The reaction you get from your audience tells you something about how to improve your speech. Certain discomfort you experience in the actual delivery of the speech calls your attention to things you must change in order to make the speech more comfortable to deliver.
• Audience reaction is an essential ingredient in this whole business of speaking.
• Listening, like reading, is primarily an activity of the mind, not of the ear or the eye. When the mind is not actively involved in the process, it should be called hearing, not listening; seeing, not reading.
• The most prevalent mistake that people make about both listening and reading is to regard them as passively receiving rather than as actively participating.
• Passive reading, which is almost always with the eyes in motion but with the mind not engaged, is not reading at all.
• In both, the mind of the receiver—the reader or listener—must somehow penetrate through the words used to the thought that lies behind them. The impediments that language places in the way of understanding must be overcome. The vocabulary of the speaker or writer is seldom if ever identical with the vocabulary of the listener or reader. The latter must always make the effort to get at a meaning that can be expressed in different sets of words. The listener must come to terms with the speaker, just as the reader must come to terms with the writer. This, in effect, means discovering what the idea is regardless of how it is expressed in words.
• In most discourses, whether spoken or written, the number of truly important propositions being advanced is relatively small. The listener, like the reader, must detect these and highlight them in his mind, separating them from all the contextual remarks that are interstitial, transitional, or merely elaborative and amplifying.
• With regard to anything that one understands, either by reading or listening, it is always necessary to make up one’s own mind about where one stands—either agreeing or disagreeing.
• Unlike reading, listening is subject to the limitations of time. We can only listen once to what is being said to us and the pace of our listening is determined by the pace set by the speaker.
• The essence of being a good reader is to be a demanding reader. A demanding reader is one who stays awake while reading, and does so by asking questions as he reads. Passivity in reading, which really renders the process null and void, consists in using one’s eyes to see the words, but not using one’s mind to understand what they mean.
• The good listener, like the good reader, is a demanding listener, one who keeps awake while listening by having in mind the questions to be asked about the speech being listened to.
• What is the whole speech about?
• What are the main or pivotal ideas, conclusions, and arguments?
• Are the speaker’s conclusions sound or mistaken?
• What of it?
• Since listening to a speech or any other form of oral discourse is intrinsically more difficult than reading a book or an essay, it is even more necessary to put pen or pencil to paper in the process. Skillful listening involves skillful note-taking, both while the speech is going on and after it is over, when one reviews one’s notes and reflects on them.
• What is true of reading is equally true of listening.
• Making notes while reading is highly useful, certainly to be recommended to anyone who may lapse back into passive reading, but it is not absolutely necessary. It may not be necessary to make notes while listening if the speech to which you are listening is sufficiently brief. However, if it promises to be fairly long and complex, you would be well advised to bring pencil and paper to the task of listening to it.
• Writing while listening is productive and desirable. Talking while listening is counterproductive.
• Many listeners wait too long before they begin to jot down notes.
• Don’t be a pushover for persuasion, but at the same time do not erect insuperable barriers to being moved by it.
• The person engaged in persuasion should be as anxious and ready to engage in two-way talk as the audience being addressed.
• Speakers who seek to instruct also profit from engaging in the two-way talk of a forum or question and answer session after the speech is finished. Without it, they can seldom if ever be sure that what they have tried to say has been well listened to, nor can they make a reasonable estimate of how far they succeeded in affecting the minds of their audience in the way they wished.
• I would almost dare to say that speaking and listening, when properly conjoined in a lecture-forum, is the best way to write a book.
• One is to improve the questions asked by rephrasing them in a way that accords better with the substance of the speech.
• It is often the case that the listener has a good question in mind but is inept in phrasing it. Sometimes a question is thrown wildly at the target rather than being carefully directed. Here again a reformulation of the question by the speaker helps to advance the discussion instead of allowing it to wander far afield.
• In politics, in business negotiations, in selling, delivering a persuasive speech is never enough. It should always be followed by a question and answer session in which the persuader can both answer questions raised by his audience and raise questions, especially good rhetorical questions, that elicit the answers he wishes to get from them.
• When instruction is the purpose of the speech, listeners should have two objectives in mind. One is to be sure that they fully understand what they have heard. The other is to challenge the speaker in such a way that they can decide whether to agree or disagree with what has been said about this point or that.
• A good social conversation can never be planned in advance. It just happens if the circumstances fortuitously favor its occurring.
• Socratic teaching—teaching by questioning and through discussion—is the most difficult kind of teaching, as well as the most rewarding for everyone involved.
• Language is the instrument that we use, and must use for the most part, in communicating with one another.
• It is a very imperfect medium of communication—cloudy, obscure, full of ambiguities and pitfalls of misunderstanding.
• The language of a specialist includes many terms that are the peculiar jargon of his trade, not shared by specialists in other fields.
• Self-knowledge is still another factor that, when present, facilitates intelligent conversation and, when absent, impedes and frustrates it. Understanding one’s self is a necessary condition for understanding anyone else.
• One should be at least able to talk clearly to oneself. Such clarity in soliloquy is indispensable to clarity in dialogue. Those who lack the insight that is required for intelligent conversation with themselves can scarcely be expected to have the insight needed for intelligent conversation with others.
• Pick the right place and occasion for a conversation, one that provides sufficient time for carrying it on and one that is free from the annoyance of distractions that interrupt or divert it.
• There are times for small talk and times, so to speak, for big talk.
• Good talk is usually slow in getting started and long in winding up.
• Know in advance what kind of conversation you are trying to have.
• For whatever kind of serious conversation it is to be, select the right people with whom to have it. Don’t try to discuss everything with everybody.
• Most important of all, never engage in the discussion of a problem with someone you know in advance has a closed mind on that subject.
• A judicious selection of the persons with whom to talk about certain matters is as important as a judicious choice of the right time, place, or occasion for conversation about them.
• Certain matters are undiscussable and, therefore, one should avoid discussing them.
• Only about matters concerning which objective truth can be ascertained is it worthwhile to engage in argument of one sort or another for the sake of ascertaining it.
• The personal prejudice or unsupportable opinion that I hold may have subjective truth. It may be true for me, but not for you.
• Objective truth, in contrast, consists in that which is true, not just for you or for me, but for everyone everywhere.
• Don’t listen only to yourself.
• A closely related rule calls on you to listen to a question with an effort to understand it before answering it, and then with an effort to address yourself to the question in the light of your understanding of it.
• Many persons take questions as nothing more than signals for them to speak, uttering whatever happens to be on their mind at the moment, whether or not it has any relevance to the question that calls for their response.
• If you have any sense at all that you may not understand the question you have been asked, don’t try to answer it. Instead ask your interrogator to explain the question, to rephrase it in some way that makes it more intelligible to you.
• A parallel rule, if you are on the questioning rather than the answering end of a conversation, is to ask your questions as clearly and as intelligibly as possible. Don’t be a lazy questioner.
• Don’t interrupt while someone else is speaking. Don’t be so impatient to say what is on your mind that you cannot wait for the other person to finish speaking before you say it.
• Don’t be rude by engaging in a side conversation while someone to whom you should be listening is talking. At the same time, don’t be too polite.
• Recognize that anything that takes time should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
• Ask others about themselves; at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.
• Keep your voice modulated.
• Listen to whoever is speaking and make it apparent that you are listening by not letting your eyes wander or your attention be diverted.
• If you are an active participant in a conversation or discussion, your first obligation is to focus on the question to be considered.
• In short, be relevant, first, last, and always.
• Being relevant simply consists in paying close attention to the point that is being talked about and saying nothing that is not significantly related to it.
• My only recommendation here is that you should be on the alert to recognize when you are failing to understand something and press for help in understanding it.
• You should be aware that you have certain preconceptions and assumptions, and try to dredge them up from the recesses of your mind and lay them on the table for everyone to examine.
• Never argue about facts; look them up if you wish to settle a difference of opinion about them.
• Many persons have difficulty in dealing with generalizations, especially when these are stated at a high level of abstraction. A concrete example offered to illustrate something stated abstractly helps them to understand what is being said.
• If you don’t understand what others are saying, it is not only proper but also prudent for you to ask them to give you an example of the point. If they cannot do this to your satisfaction, it may be fair to suspect that they themselves do not fully understand what they are trying to say.
• Our emotions play an important role in everything we do and say, but they do not help us to talk sense or to converse in a profitable and pleasurable manner.
• Do not allow an impersonal discussion to become a personal quarrel. Argument is not aggression. There is no point at all in trying to win an argument simply by putting your opponent down or beating him up.
• Practical conversations are often unsuccessful because misunderstanding prevents them from reaching a decision.
• The pursuit of truth has many stages. At each stage some progress may be made and yet still fall short of the goal aimed at.
• Human beings—creatures of passion as well as of intellect, with minds that are often clouded by their feelings, and with all the other limitations to which their fallible minds are subject—must be satisfied with some measure of approximation to the ideal and not inordinately seek its complete realization, at least not at any given time or place.
• We can never completely master our emotions and should not expect to, even when managing them properly is highly desirable.
• We can never completely get out of ourselves and into the other person’s shoes and see things as he or she sees them.
• Skilled habits can be formed only through practise under supervision by a coach who corrects wrong moves and requires that right ones be made.
• The three kinds of teaching—didactic, Socratic, and coaching—are correlated with three kinds of learning. The acquisition of organized knowledge in basic fields of subject matter is the kind of learning that is aided by didactic teaching—teaching by telling, lectures, and textbooks. The development of all the intellectual skills is the kind of learning that requires coaching. The third form of teaching—the Socratic method of teaching by asking and by discussion—facilitates the kind of learning that is an enlargement of the understanding of basic ideas and values.
• The task of the moderator is threefold:
• (1) to ask a series of questions that control the discussion and give it direction;
• (2) to examine the answers by trying to evoke the reasons for them or the implications they have; and
• (3) to engage the participants in two-way talk with one another when the views they have advanced appear to be in conflict.
• Of all the things that human beings do, conversing with one another is the most characteristically human.
• Human communication in two-way talk can achieve a meeting of minds, a sharing of understandings and thoughts, of feelings and wishes.
• A republic in which there is no discussion of the res publica—the public things that we refer to as public affairs—is as much a caricature of its true self as would be a military organization in which there is no armament and no consideration of the strategy and tactics for the use of arms.