我很少看电视，但最近有个朋友要我看看下午的一档节目，是针对家庭主妇而开的，收视率很高。朋友认为该节目里观众参与的部分，会引起我的兴趣。的确是这样的，我看了几次，很欣赏主持人能够请观众参与谈话，而观众的说话方式也引起了我的注意：这些人显然都不是职业演讲家，也没有经过什么沟通艺术的训练，甚至讲得很差，还读白字。可是他们全都说得很有趣，他们说话时，似乎全无上镜头的恐惧，还能吸引电视观众的注意力。I SELDOM WATCH television in the daytime. But a friend recently asked me to listen to an afternoon show that was directed primarily to housewives. It enjoyed a very high rating, and my friend wanted me to listen because he thought the audience participation part of the show would interest me. It certainly did. I watched it several times, fascinated by the way the master of ceremonies succeeded in getting people in the audience to make talks in a way that caught and held my attention. These people were obviously not professional speakers. They had never been trained in the art of communication. Some of them used poor grammar and mispronounced words. But all of them were interesting. When they started to talk they seemed to lose all fear of being on camera and they held the attention of the audience.

怎么会这样呢？我知道答案。我在训练班里采用这种方法已经多年。这些人——平常的男人和女人，之所以能抓住全国收视者的注意，就因为他们谈的是自己：不管是自己最难为情的时刻，还是自己最美好的回忆，或是如何遇见自己的妻子我丈夫等。他们根本就没有去想要什么绪论、正文和结论，也不关心什么用词造句，然而他们却获得了观众的欣赏，他们完全倾注于他们所要说的事情。而这正好明了我认为的，学习当众说话的前三个最基本的法则。Why was this? I know the answer because I have been employing the techniques used in this program for many years. These people, plain, ordinary men and women, were holding the attention of viewers all over the country; they were talking about themselves, about their most embarrassing moments, their most pleasant memory, or how they met their wives or husbands. They were not thinking of introduction, body, and conclusion. They were not concerned with their diction or their sentence structure. Yet they were getting the final seal of approval from the audience complete attention in what they had to say. This is dramatic proof of what to me is the first of three cardinal rules for a quick and easy way to learn to speak in public: