TRIPPINGLY ON THE TONGUE

With the Boylston and Lee Wade speaking competition once again getting under way, the inadequacy of these prizes in stimulating and rewarding a genuine interest in public speaking becomes painfully apparent. For a contest that requires a mere verbal recitation of long memory passages hardly fits into the present day oratorical picture, when speakers and would-be speakers are most interested in developing their own ability to organize material and deliver it more or less extemporaneously. Clearly some change that would give value to the competition as an exercise in public speaking instead of a recital of other people's writings is called for.

The reason why the Boylston Prize, and the Lee Wade Prize which was later grouped with it, has remained a recitative spectacle rather than a genuine sally in public speaking is not hard to find. In a day when oratory was fine art, and the limbs and outward flourishes of speech more highly rates than keen thinking, the original bequest provided for "a public exhibition in elocution." The speaker was "never to rehearse his own composition," but merely to learn by rote some famous passage and deliver it as best he could. The Lee Wade competition even went so far as to require everybody to learn the same piece, until one long-suffering audience was prostrated by seven or eight canters with Browning's Good News from Ghent to Aix.

Though past years have seen a let-up in the strict oratorical standards that once judged the contest, the competition still bears the hall-mark of the Daniel Webster era that engendered it. Of far more practical worth, however, would be prizes in public speaking. A striking witness to the value of drawing up one's own material and presenting it to an audience in direct and straightforward fashion is furnished by the hundred-odd undergraduates enrolled in various public speaking courses, and the many more that engage in debating from time to time. And it is for these men, rather than for mere memorizers, that the prizes should be set up as goal and sea-mark of their utmost sail.

Thus, to rescue the prizes from the limbo of mid-nineteenth century rhetoric, it is high time for University Hall to adapt the conditions under which the contest operates to the demands of modern times. For only by making the contest a competition in writing and delivering original material can the Lee Wade and Boylston awards proceed further in their purpose to stimulate and develop the ideal of effective public speaking in the college.