我很少看電視,但最近有個朋友要我看看下午的一檔節(jié)目,是針對家庭主婦而開的,收視率很高。朋友認為該節(jié)目里觀眾參與的部分,會引起我的興趣。的確是這樣的,我看了幾次,很欣賞主持人能夠請觀眾參與談話,而觀眾的說話方式也引起了我的注意:這些人顯然都不是職業(yè)演講家,也沒有經過什么溝通藝術的訓練,甚至講得很差,還讀白字??墒撬麄內颊f得很有趣,他們說話時,似乎全無上鏡頭的恐懼,還能吸引電視觀眾的注意力。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.
怎么會這樣呢?我知道答案。我在訓練班里采用這種方法已經多年。這些人——平常的男人和女人,之所以能抓住全國收視者的注意,就因為他們談的是自己:不管是自己最難為情的時刻,還是自己最美好的回憶,或是如何遇見自己的妻子我丈夫等。他們根本就沒有去想要什么緒論、正文和結論,也不關心什么用詞造句,然而他們卻獲得了觀眾的欣賞,他們完全傾注于他們所要說的事情。而這正好明了我認為的,學習當眾說話的前三個最基本的法則。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: