Presentation

“ Thus we keep the characters as simple as possible, trying for individual examples of conventional types, for definite persons that develop sharply, in small groups, with strong contrasts. The presentation we elaborate as much as possible—how the characters affect one another and display themselves in deeds and words. ”

“ A delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, by making it a mere abstraction. ”

“ Again, this type of exercise may involve the presentation of material which is to be used as a basis for appreciation in literature, in music, in art, in history, and the like. The organization of experiences of children, whether secured through observations, discussions, or from books, around certain topics may furnish a most satisfactory basis for the development of problems or of the gathering of the material essential for their solution. ”

“ Moreover, unless comparison of the familiar and the unfamiliar is introduced at the beginning, both preparation and presentation will be aimless and without logical motive, isolated, and in so far meaningless. The student's mind cannot be prepared at large, but only for something in particular, and presentation is usually the best way of evoking associations. ”

“ The best possible presentation is a subject that manual training men can investigate with profit. Asking questions and getting answers and giving demonstrations may mean much or may mean little in the way of developing the boys—nor can you tell always by the material results obtained—it all depends upon how these things are done. ”

“ The observations which obtain in the presentation and acceptance of a material object—as a book, a silver tea set, a medal, an art gallery—apply just as well to the bestowal and acceptance of an honor, such as a degree from a university, an office, an appointment as head of a committee or as foreign representative, or membership in a society. ”

“ The actual presentation of experience for an audience demands an ordering of data in a sequence that will be sensibly logical for them. We live experience in an order that flows from our being and history within a multiplicity of calls and responses. Presently human expression is limited to sequentiality. ”

“ The lecture form has the advantage of suggesting an audience with a definite mental background which it is the purpose of the lecture to modify in a specific way. In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. ”

“ When two men are discussing anything it is the conception and not the varying individual presentations of it that they aim at. The conception, then, is the standard of value for the individual presentations. ”

“ If one is to have an interview, one should carefully prepare one's introductory remarks, paying particular attention to one's line of action, to one's method of presentation, and the words upon which one relies to obtain an affirmative reply to one's request. ”

“ The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation. ”

“ And yet since truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion, I think it expedient that the understanding should have permission, after the three Tables of First Presentation (such as I have exhibited) have been made and weighed, to make an essay of the Interpretation of Nature in the affirmative way; ”

“ We have but to think a moment of such a matter as the play of representational values, those that make it a part, and an important part, of our taking offered things in that we should take them as aspects and visibilities—take them to the utmost as appearances, images, figures, objects, so many important, so many contributive items of the furniture of the world—in order to feel immediately the effect of such a condition at every turn of our adventure and every point of the representative surface. ”

“ The presentations which transfer their intensities to one another are very loosely connected, and are joined together by such forms of association as are spurned in our serious thought and are utilized in the production of the effect of wit only. ”

“ I have therefore thought that it would be a worthy and very useful thing to reduce the whole of this great art to a complete and orderly form of presentation, and then in different books to lay down and explain the required characteristics of different departments. ”

“ In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. ”

“ Then as you go about your other work you will find a number of occasions that will arouse ideas bearing upon this subject. You may read in a newspaper of a brilliant speech made before the Chamber of Commerce by a leading business man, which will serve as an illustration to support your affirmative position; or you may attend a banquet where a prominent business man disappoints his audience with a wretched speech. Such experiences, and many others, bearing more or less directly upon the subject, will come to you, and will call up the theme-subject, with which they will unite themselves. ”

“ All literature, then, may be separated into five classes,—narration, description, exposition, argument, and persuasion.
Narration tells what things do; description tells how things look. Narration deals with occurrences; description deals with appearances. Exposition defines a term, or explains a proposition; argument proves the truth or falsity of a proposition; persuasion urges to action upon a proposition. Exposition explains; argument 4 convinces; persuasion arouses. These are the broad lines of distinction which separate the five forms of discourse. ”

“ From the salons of society, from the world of politics and diplomacy, as well as from the ranks of the learned professions and of the fine arts, men and women assemble to listen to the exposition of the latest discoveries or the newest advances in philosophy by the men who have made them. Every discourse must, so far as the subject admits, be illustrated in the best possible way by experiments, by diagrams, by the exhibition of specimens. Not infrequently, the person invited to give a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution will begin his preparations five or six months39 beforehand. ”

“ And here we reach a point toward which we have attempted to steer; we mean the fullness of character, the entire inward person—the meeting—the combination—the fusion, indeed, of all those properties and qualities of the mind, by a well-directed education; the balancing of the various propensities and gifts by the skillful hand of instruction, so that no appetite, natural or acquired, shall have an undue predominancy, or serve to constitute the distinguishing characteristic of the possessor. ”

“ In our houses, at our tables, sports and interludes are the topics of conversation. Enter the places of academical lectures, and who talks of any other subject? The preceptors themselves have caught the contagion. ”

“ An idea comes to me, or I to it', she says, airily, 'a scene—a situation—a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint I begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? ”

“ Skill in division is valuable not only as a method of exposition but it is linked closely with an effective method of proving to be explained in the next chapter—the method of residues. Can you recall any extracts given in this book in which some form of division is used? Is this form of material likely to be more important in preparation or in the finished speech? Explain your opinion—in other words, present a specimen of exposition.
Definition. One of the simplest ways of explaining is to define a term. Dictionary definitions are familiar to everyone. ”

“ In the first place, the distinguishing features of an object may be presented; and in this case exposition partakes of the nature of description. In the second place, an object or idea may be explained by pointing out its effects; and in this case exposition partakes of the character of narration. In the third place, we may explain or define an object or conception by indicating its resemblance or its unlikeness to something else that is known. But whatever method of exposition is adopted, it should be full and definite enough to impart a clear idea of the thing explained. ”

“ Men of the first rank and talent, the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical, blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young—all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attention and unbounded applause. ”

“ In fact, this is a frequent practise in public speech, where the minds of the hearers often ask for reiteration and expanded statement to help them grasp a subject in its several aspects. This is the very heart of exposition—to amplify and clarify all the terms by which a matter is defined.
Example is another method of amplifying a definition or of expounding an idea more fully. The following sentences immediately succeed Mr. Bates's definition and contrast just quoted:
A good deal which we are accustomed inexactly to call description is really exposition. ”

“ All real units of experience overlap. Let a row of equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which we intellectualize the world. Let a ruler long enough to cover at least three dots stand for our sensible experience. Then the conceived changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the ruler along the line of dots. ”

“ For these four discourses subjects have to be found; materials for exposition and illustration have to be collected; the mind has first to make each subject its own and then to shape it into a form suitable for popular effect. ”

“ We all know the trick of it. If we want to tell the substance of a conversation, a sermon, a lecture, we ‘go over it in our minds’ first and the mind puts its question to itself, the same question over and over again, no more than,—What next?—and lo, we have it, the whole thing complete! ”

“ And as the audience go out after the lecture, they doubtless ask one another, in amazed whispers, how it is that sensible men who make so many "concessions" can find it in their hearts to maintain the doctrine of evolution at all! ”

“ The lectures are the lectures of a sick man, given to a popular audience in the uproar of revolution, without adequate preparation, improvised in large part, and offered as one side of a crucial and bitterly disputed question. ”

“ The basis for development in Effective Speaking rests upon one’s bodily, emotional and mental agencies of expression, and a knowledge of their respective importance and efficient use. That which counts most for development is conscientious practice ”

“ Now because this exposition has for its object only phenomenal knowledge, the exposition itself seems not to be science, free, self-moving in the shape proper to itself, but may, from this point of view, be taken as the pathway of the natural consciousness which is pressing forward to true knowledge. ”

“ A repetition of the selections to be learned, with full expression by voice and action, repetition again, and again, and again, until the sentiment of them becomes a living reality to the speaker, is the only way to acquire the ability to indicate to others the true proportions, the relative values, and the distinctive character, of what is to be said. ”

“ Such lectures were generally delivered in manufacturing towns and the great centres of population. There is always in every audience a number whose minds are rendered pliable by the speaker's tongue, particularly if their own interests are involved. ”

“ The great exposition now in progress is notable not only for its material illustration of the arts and industries of the world, but chiefly because in its conception the place of first importance has been given to education. ”

“ One can but answer such questions in the most fragmentary and tentative way, relying for the most part on the opinions and information of those who know, those who are in the van of action, at home and abroad, but also on one's own personal impressions of an incomparable scene. ”

“ A student meeting with an unfamiliar combination of characters can turn to its pages and find every passage given, in sufficient fullness, where the phrase in question has been used by poet, historian, or essayist. ”

“ All the knotty questions of the realm are referred to us, and, when they are discussed in the common hearing, each of us, without strife or objectation, sharpens his wits to speak well upon them, and produces, from a more subtile vein, what he thinks the most prudent and sensible advice.' This is in contrast with the turbulent, and sometimes stormy, discussions in the rising Universities. ”

“ The four forms of English composition are exposition, argumentation, narration, and description. Exposition teaches; argumentation convinces and persuades; narration tells; description shows. In oratory we have five classes: philosophic, demonstrative, forensic, deliberative, and social, and the four forms of composition may be employed in any of the five classes of oratory. Speakers, as a rule, use the narrative for the statement; exposition, argumentation, or description, for the body ”