AND by C. W. Stone

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 14, 1879

AND

By C. W. Stone

This is a very useful word, serving as a ligature to bind ideas together. It should not be used by a speaker until he is sure he has an idea to put beyond it. It is not intended to serve as a hotel or waiting-room in the line of language, into which the speaker may noisily rush, to pause while he manufactures the next idea. It rarely requires emphasizing.

Public speakers, unless they are capable of criticising themselves, or unless they have some friend who will carefully criticise them, are almost certain to acquire some very bad habit. One will smack at every paragraph. One will go through with the noise of clearing the throat at every long pause, albeit his throat was perfectly clear before. Another will make a catch of the voice about half the length of the above, at every point where the next word is not right at the tongue’s end. But the principal object before me is to notice a common faulty usage of the word and.

Occasionally a speaker acquires the habit of speaking the word “and” with considerable emphasis. I have heard that word loudly emphasized in connection with some very important idea, while the word expressing the idea was left to languish in weakness.

One error in the use of this word is closely allied to a certain faulty management of the voice, or rather, to a certain lack of its management. A speaker starts out on a high key. When he gets well warmed up, his voice runs on a very level course, lacking terribly for modulation and inflection. For an emphatic word he may possibly increase the force, and raise the key about a minor third; and when he should let his voice fall, he drops it only about half way down. He is going on like a runaway engine, and he can’t make a full stop. He gets clear to the end of a sentence before he thinks where his voice is, when he is frightened to find his voice away up among the clouds. How shall he get it down? If he were reading, he might repeat the last word; but it will not do now,—it would sound like a school-boy’s declamation. There is only one way,—launching out upon an emphatic and, he adds another sentence, unconsciously hoping that the wording of it may aid him in making a better period.

Generally a short sentence is better than a long one. Look ahead for a period. If you get to one before you think of it, leave your voice up there once or twice as a sort of penance upon yourself, and spare the ears of the audience from the ringing of that monotonous “and.”

C. W. STONE.