POWER OF SHORT WORDS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 5, 1879

POWER OF SHORT WORDS.

BREVITY is the soul of wit, and length costs strength. These familiar rules are generally applied to sentences and speeches, but they apply to words as well.

An admirer of Mr. Bright writes to a Manchester paper that he has discovered the secret of the power this great speaker possesses of riveting the attention of his audience. This he believes to lie in the fact that he uses monosyllables very largely. The grand passage in Mr. Bright’s speech on the burials bill, describing a Quaker funeral, begins, “I will take the cause of my own sect,” and on counting the words of that remarkable oration, it will be found that out of 190 words, 149, more than 75 per cent, were monosyllables. On this it is urged that those in charge of an American Journal lately mentioned of a school for boys in the art of public speaking, that if they had learned nothing else, they had acquired the greatest contempt for devices of stump oratory.