Transcription
Dr. Ralph Nichols, who is head of the rhetoric department at the University of Minnesota, has chosen as his text today, so it seems, "He who has ears, let him hear." This has been, in a way, one of the major themes of Dr. Nichols' professional career, for he has given a great deal of time to research, writing, and speaking on the art of listening. His writing is too extensive to describe here, since he has written some, or been author or co-author of some [inaudible] books and many articles. And among these writings is a popular book which raises the question, "Are you listening?" Dr. Nichols, we can answer your question in the affirmative. We are listening; we who have ears are waiting to hear.
[Applause]
Thank you, Ray, for that very pleasant introduction. Good morning, friends and fellow students. Way back in the year 1940, Dr. Harry Goldstein at Columbia University completed a very important piece of research. It was underwritten by one of our educational foundations. It was very carefully drawn and was designed to compare the relative efficiency of reading and listening, the two media through which we do the bulk of our learning. At the end of his study, he made two observations of a good deal of interest.
One, he said, "It is clearly apparent from my data that it is easily possible for the human being to listen to human speech at a rate three times the pace we normally hear it without any significant loss of comprehension of it whatsoever."
Two, he said, "It is a curious thing; we have not taught our young people how to listen, side by side with teaching them how to read, from the first day the first public school house opened its doors." A few educators read this report, worried a little, did nothing much about it.
Shortly after that, however, a very important figure in the television industry, Richard Hubble, completed a year of research, published a new book, and in it declared without equivocation that ninety-eight percent of all that a man learns in his lifetime, he learns through his eyes or through his ears. Hubble's book threw a spotlight upon a long-neglected organ you and I own, our ears, and it threw into focus one of the most important researches of our period: this one done by Paul Rankin at Ohio State University.
Rankin was determined to find out what proportion of our waking day we spend communicating with one another. He enlisted the help of sixty-five white-collar folk, much like you and me, with each individual promising to keep careful log on all his conscious waking daytime activities at fifteen-minute intervals for two months on end. Rankin collected all these data, tabulated them, stared at the results, couldn't believe his own eyes, but published them. Immediately, they were republished in a score of professional journals.
Here's what he found: seventy percent of our conscious waking day is spent in communication. Seven out of every ten minutes that you and I are conscious, alive, and awake, we're communicating. Rankin broke this down among its component parts, found that we spent nine percent of that time writing, sixteen percent reading, thirty percent talking, forty-five percent listening.
Now, educators in all the states were upset. For quantitatively speaking, America has built her school system exactly upside down. If a youngster goes through college, some poor pedagogue has spent a total of sixteen years and all trying to teach him what a sentence is, and then sometimes we have the young man a four-year degree without knowing for certain that he really knows what a sentence is. We pour countless tax dollars and teacher hours of energy into the refining of the least-used channel of communication: writing.
Reading gets the second biggest investment. Standard practice in America is to have eight grades of reading -- reading improvement. For some reason I've never understood, we chop it off at the end of the eighth grade. Any further gains made are only on an individual basis. As a nation, we average out reading about 270 words a minute with sixty-five percent comprehension of what we read, exactly the performance level of a sixth-grade child. But even eight years calls for a lot of tax dollars and teacher hours of energy.
Then you get to something important quantitatively: speech. And if you will look into any high school curriculum in the state of Minnesota, or any other state, you will hunt a long time trying to find one single required speech course in that high school curriculum. If it's a real good high school, there will be a couple of all-school plays put on each year. If it is a top-notch school, or maybe a debate team with a couple of lawyers' sons on it, there may be an all-school orator or extempore speaker, and that's about the end of it.
Speech training in most of our secondary schools is a kind of an extracurricular activity, a peripheral function without much academic respectability attached to it. The horrible truth is, in one sense, that most of the speech training taught in America is taught by Dale Carnegie and his cohorts in night classes. For a hundred and fifty dollars a head tuition costs, you can get a few evenings of attention to your speaking abilities in night school classes. It's not such bad training, I guess, but it comes too late in life and too expensively to do many of us much good.
Then you get to the most important, quantitatively, of these four communicative processes: listening. And twelve or fifteen years ago, you could hardly find a man who had ever heard of it. I guess I was one of those most upset by the data I've already recited to you. I asked my university for a sabbatic leave, spent twelve months trying to find out what a good listener looks and acts like, anyhow. First off, I wanted to know what was known about it. I couldn't find a high school, nor a grade school in America teaching it. I did find one little college teaching it, a girls' school down in Missouri, Stephens College by name. I guess they regarded it as a social grace to teach their coeds in Missouri how to listen. There have been a few occasions in my life when I wished my wife could have gone to Stephens College.
To my astonishment, I discovered that more than 3,000 scientific and experimental researches had been completed and published in the parallel learning medium of reading. Only one, which you could dignify with those adjectives, had been completed and published in the field of listening comprehension.
Now, I ask you folks to look at this with me. Sixteen percent of our communication time we read; 3,000 researches tell us how to read better. Forty-five percent of our communication time we listen, and twelve or fifteen years ago, there was one study with the word "listening" even in its title. But a very dramatic decade has just passed. Today, most of our notable universities are teaching listening under that label. More importantly, they're doing graduate-level research in the territory. We've ground out 125 PhD degrees in the past ten years alone in the field of listening comprehension. Scores of industries have instituted their own listening training programs. General Motors just put one in for every supervisor throughout that giant corporation. Thirty-four departments of the federal government now have listening training for their personnel. Every branch of the military service today has listening training for selected officer personnel. Training films are on the market, standardized tests are available, and all across America, under what we have come to call the language arts approach to language facility, high schools and grade schools, too, are at long last beginning to install some listening training along with training in reading, writing, and speaking.
In view of this sudden surge of interest in effective listening, essentially developing in a single decade, this morning I should like to raise just two questions with you folks and very closely pursue answers to them.
Question number one: Is bad listening a problem? Certainly is in school. The first man to throw a light on it there was Professor Harry Jones at Columbia University. Several years ago, one fall, he was put in charge of all the beginning sections in psychology for freshmen at Columbia. He had 486 youngsters enrolled in these sections. He made it his practice one day each week to bunch up this population of freshmen, give them an important weekly lecture, and then immediately test their comprehension over what he'd said. Every time he did this, he got more and more depressed. It just didn't seem to him he was getting much of anything through to the brains of his freshmen. But he had upon a very novel idea for an experiment. He talked fifty of his colleagues on the faculty into cooperating with him, each professor representing a different subject-matter field. Each professor promised to come in and give a ten-minute cutting of his own favorite lecture in his own subject-matter territory to Jones's freshmen population. Furthermore, each professor submitted this ten-minute excerpt to Jones ahead of time, who painstakingly built an objective test over its content. Half the items in each test amended recalling of facts; the other half demanded an understanding of a principle or two embedded in the lecture excerpt.
Now, any teacher can make his students look stupid by making his test too hard, or he can make his students look brilliant by making his test too easy. Jones did neither one. He was conscientiously trying to find out what proportion of a ten-minute informative talk can be assimilated and recalled by university freshmen. The experiment proceeded. Professor one walked out, gave his ten-minute pitch, the group was tested, and he disappeared. Number two followed. After several days had passed, that group had heard fifty little lectures, then tested fifty times. Jones collected all the papers, scored them, found that on the average, these freshmen could answer correctly just half the items in the quizzes. Then came the payoff. He let two months go by, reassembled his 486 freshmen, gave them the whole battery of fifty tests a second time. This time, they were able to answer correctly just twenty-five percent of the items in the quizzes. The old curve of forgetting had hit those freshmen as it hits you and me and everybody else who tries to learn something. They had lost just half what they at first had known.
Jones was forced to conclude, reluctantly, that without training in listening, university freshmen appear to operate at a twenty-five percent level of efficiency when they listen to a ten-minute talk. I didn't believe it could possibly be that bad. I decided to run the experiment over at the University of Minnesota and did so. I followed exactly the format Jones had used, with just one deviation: I didn't wait two months for the retesting, but only two weeks. I was pretty certain it doesn't take eight weeks to forget half what we've learned. I got exactly the same report to make that Jones had made. My youngsters knew half their answers in the immediate situation; they knew a fourth after two weeks had gone by. I now believe I would probably have had about the same report to make if I had tested at the end of two days instead of two weeks. For that old forgetting curve always takes essentially the same pattern. If we know this much immediately after learning it, there's always an early downward swoop, and then a leveling off, and we tend to retain the residue until we become senile or die. And that residue, in the case of listening, always comes out at the twenty-five percent efficiency level when you're listening to a ten-minute talk. Heaven knows what it's going to be for this one you're now hearing. This is going to run about forty-five minutes, and you're certain to get even less than twenty-five percent of it. How do you like that?
Most you people like to think of yourselves as efficient organisms. At the end of the day at school, you like to sink into a chair somewhere and reflect to yourself, "Well, all in all, I think I must have been operating around ninety or ninety-five percent efficiency, all factors figured in." One businessman I know says he has to run his assembly line at ninety-eight percent efficiency, or he's broke. "I can allow two percent for scrap in my shop, and that's all. The profit margin is so narrow in my field," he argues. That same man, proud of ninety-eight percent efficiency on his assembly line, doubtlessly operates at a twenty-five percent level of efficiency when he does that one thing in this world we do more frequently than any other single thing you can name, except to breathe.
Is bad listening a problem? Certainly is in church. A couple of years ago, a couple of years ago, I had a young Lutheran minister in my graduate seminar. He got much worried about whether he was being heard on Sunday mornings or not. Between us, we worked out a little experiment trying to get an answer to his doubt. He built one sermon, thirty minutes long, in two equal parts. For fifteen minutes, he talked about "Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child," the title of an article that earlier had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. He underlined the thesis of the writer and he said, "That's right. We ought to beat these youngsters of ours. We never should have given up corporal punishment in the first place. Whom the Lord loveth, he [inaudible]," he argued. He went on in this vein for fifteen minutes. Then he swung completely around, went into a fifteen-minute segment of his sermon, strictly theological in character. Here he used such language as, "Repent your sins, live righteously, love your neighbor," and so on.
From the pulpit that Sunday morning, he said to his people, "Your minister, being a very young man, would like to improve himself in his profession. Therefore, I'm going to ask the ushers to hand you, as you leave the sanctuary this morning, a questionnaire, actually, it was an examination. Please take these questionnaires, please take the questionnaires home with you," he plead, "fill out the answers and mail them back to me before next Sunday morning." Well, apparently, people wanted to make a better preacher out of him. More than seventy percent of them took the examination and mailed it in. He scored these tests with great interest. He discovered that his people could answer just over half the questions that dealt with "Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child." They could answer fewer than twenty percent of the questions that dealt with a theological type of sermon content. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Why do we go to church in the first place if we don't want to hear what the man has to say?
Is bad listening a problem? Certainly is in court. The other day, I got a letter from a New England lawyer raising a peculiar question. He said he had just completed a civil case in Boston, at the end of which the judge spent eight hours instructing the jury on the law that they were to use in making their decision. "My question of you, professor," he wrote, "is this: What proportion of that eight-hour discourse will the jurors understand and use in making their decision?" In honesty, I had to write back that probably the answer was zero percent of it; couldn't possibly be over five percent of such a long discourse. Suddenly, the question hit me: What kind of justice do we get in the American court? We could find out. All we'd have to do would be to make transcriptions of a dozen judges' instructions to that number of juries, build a long set of objective test questions over the content, administer the whole routine to a university population somewhere, and we'd come up with an answer. I think the result of such a study might be the most inflammable article ever appearing in one of our national magazines.
Is bad listening a problem? It certainly is in the field of management. The Savage Lewis Corporation of Minneapolis is an advertising and communications firm. A few years ago, they set out determined to discover the communicative efficiency in American business and industrial management. They made a careful study of a hundred industries. I'd like to report their data to you. In order to understand these figures, you'll have to recognize that typically, in these one hundred industries, there were five levels of management above the worker pool down at the bottom. Up at the top always was some kind of a Board of Directors. Right below that, a vice-presidential level, general supervisory level, plant manager level, foreman level, and then the hourly employees down at the bottom, sometimes unionized, sometimes not.
Early in their study, they found that one director talks very well with another director. Sometimes these fellows achieved ninety percent efficiency transmitting meaning, one brain to the other. One foreman talks very well with another foreman. Sometimes these fellows achieve ninety percent efficiency transmitting meaning from one brain to the other. Horizontal, or lateral, communication with our own peers seems to be no great problem to us in our organizations. But you start vertical communication downward, and you get an entirely different picture. Let the chairman of the board call in a vice president and tell him something, and on the average, only sixty-seven percent of the message will get through to the brain of the vice president. Now, if that's a valid figure, I have no reason to doubt its validity, it'd be a lot of fun to look inside a vice president sometime when the chairman of his board is talking to him. He must be a seething mass of thyroxine, adrenaline, shaking knees, quavering fears, tensions of all kinds. Let him pass the same message on to a general supervisor; fifty-six percent gets there. Let him give it to a plant manager; forty percent gets there. Let him give it to a foreman; thirty percent arrives. Let him pass it on to the squad of workers who are his responsibility, and on the average, in a hundred industries across this good country of ours, only twenty percent of any message could come down through five levels of authority and get to its ultimate recipient.
Makes you wonder, how can they stay in business with twenty percent efficiency in communication? After all, what is management? Lawrence Appley, the president of the American Management Association, has defined it very neatly. Management, he says, "that's simply the business of getting other people to do the things that must be done." If that definition makes as much sense to you as it does to me, then the very heart and soul of managing any enterprise has to be communication. How can we get other people to do the things that must be done if we can't communicate with them? The horrible truth is that four percent of all our businesses in America go bankrupt every twelve months. Every twenty-five years, across the history of our good country, ninety percent of all our business enterprises have gone bankrupt. Now, I can't prove they've gone bankrupt and will continue to do so because they can't communicate, but surely this is a very strong and contributory cause of bankruptcy and failure: our inability to communicate with one another.
Of all the studies done in this area that I could report to you, the one I like best, I think, was done at Loyola University. Here, the professors wanted the answer to one question only. That question was: "What is the most important single attribute of an effective manager?" For eighteen months, they chased that query, then they came up with their reply, all in the form of one short statement so frightfully important I'd like to give it to you word for word. Here's what they said: "Of all the sources of information a manager has by which he can come to know and accurately size up the personalities of the people in his department, listening to the individual employee is the most important." The most stereotyped report we have received from thousands of workers who testified they liked their supervisors was this one: "I like my boss; he listens to me. I can talk to him."
So much for my first question: Is bad listening a problem? I hope I have you all worried. Now, let me turn to my second question, which I think will be of greater interest to you: Is there anything we can do about it? After all, if you and I are condemned to a lifetime of twenty-five percent efficiency every time we try to learn something through our ears, the future has a pretty dismal outlook. Fortunately, it isn't necessary. If you and I want to become good listeners, if we want our own children someday, or our own employees someday, to become good listeners, this can be accomplished.
Several years ago, one fall at Minnesota, I screened out the 100 worst listening freshmen I could identify and the 100 best. They were drawn from a freshman population of about 7,000 people. And when you pick out the 100 worst and the 100 best, you have two widely contrasted groups of performers. I then subjected these poor, suffering 200 freshmen to about twenty different kinds of tests and measures. I measured their reading, writing, speaking, and listening, their intelligence, their mechanical aptitudes, mathematics aptitude, science aptitude. I put them through six different kinds of personality inventories, had each one fill out a long questionnaire and undergo a long interview with me. At the end of nine months of what I thought was a pretty close study of the differences between the bad and the good, it seemed clear to me that ten factors had emerged separating the one group from the other.
At the end of the year, I published an article in Collier's Magazine titled, "We Don't Know How to Listen." Collier's immediately went defunct. Fortunately, I thought, some people at Michigan State University read the article, repeated the research in that area, reported the same ten bad listening habits in Michigan I had been bemoaning in Minnesota. Three men out in Colorado repeated the study and reported nine of the same ten in that state. So, for what they are worth, I should now merely like to enumerate for you what I think are the ten worst listening habits of the American people. I do this because if we would become good listeners, we must rid ourselves of any of these habits that may be afflicting us and replace them with their counterpart skills. If we'll make that effort, there's no group of freshmen we've trained at the university yet which has failed to gain, on the average, at least twenty-five percentile ranks in listening ability. One group of 60 adults in a night class gained forty-two percentile ranks in listening ability from the training received.
Bad listening habit number one is calling the subject uninteresting. Many times, the bad listener does this as soon as the chairman announces a topic. He says, "[inaudible] communication. Every time we get together, some bird has to get up there and talk about communication. I read about it, thought of it, heard of it until I hope I never hear the stupid word again. Yes, I'll worry about that old jalopy of mine. Am I gonna trade her in this year, or wait another year to trade her off?" Off he goes on mental tangent number one because the subject is so dull.
The good listener starts at the same point, but he moves to a different conclusion. When the chairman announces the topic, the good listener says, "[inaudible] communication, that old chestnut. Every time we get together, they have to talk on that topic. Why can't they get something new on the program for a change? But just a minute, I'm kind of trapped in here. Be a little embarrassing for me, I guess, to get up and walk out right in the middle of it. And as much as I'm trapped anyhow, I might as well tune this old professor in to see if he has anything to say that I can use." The key to good listening in the first instance is that little three-letter word: "use." The good listener is a sifter, a screener, a winnower of the wheat from the chaff. He's a man always hunting for something practical or worthwhile to store away in the back part of his brain and put to work for his own selfish benefit in the months to come.
G.K. Chesterton put the whole thing in a nutshell about forty years ago when he said, "In all this world, there is no such thing as an uninteresting subject; there are only uninterested people." We admit the selfish character of it when we talk to our freshmen. We tell him to hunt for the practical or the worthwhile to them personally, store these things away in their mind, and cash them in in the years ahead.
Bad listening habit number two is criticizing the speaker's delivery. Now, this gets to be an indoor pastime on the part of many a bad listener. No sooner does a man start to talk than the bad listener says, "Look at that fella, would ya? Didn't anybody ever tell him to keep his hands out of his pockets when he's giving a speech, to look us in the eye and not read all the time? And the necktie, why doesn't his wife tell him?" On and on they go. You can find a hundred mental pics to take at any speaker whoever stands before you, and the bad listener hunts for them all.
Again, the good listener starts at the same point, but he gets to a different conclusion. When the fellow starts to talk, the good listener says, "Gee, this guy is inept. I don't think I've ever seen as awkward, graceless a character in front of an audience before in my life. You'd think for the fees we have to shell out around here, you could get something better than that, wouldn't ya? But just a minute, this character, horrible as he is, is teaching a course in organic chemistry. Five credits, required in my curriculum. I looked him up in the college catalog; he's the only man on the faculty who even teaches a course. I've got to dig the chemistry out of this fella that he knows that I don't know if it kills me. I'll pick his brains if it takes every erg of energy inside me to do it." Bearing down on the chemistry, an amazing thing happens. Not many moments go by before all the delivery faults of the poor, old, bumbling pedagogue become oblivious to the kid who's trying to get the message.
Let me illustrate the point. Suppose through that double door back there right now were to burst a janitor screaming at us in broken, profane, vulgar English, "Get the hell out of here, the building's on fire!" You and I would not all lean back in our respective chairs and say calmly to him, "Please, sir, will you not couch that admonition in better rhetoric before we follow you?" We'd be very glad to rush pell-mell out of here, as you well know. This is my point: the message is ten times as important as the clothing in which it comes dressed, the delivery of it. As soon as we recognize that simple truth, we're all on the way to becoming better listeners because we'll begin to invest a little energy in completing each communication that we hear.
Bad listening habit number three is getting overstimulated. Now, I feel like an authority on this one, for I've been overstimulated about something or other as long as I can remember back across the years of my life. I think my adrenal glands are hyperactive. At any rate, whenever I'm in an audience, the speaker seldom talks more than a minute or two before I want to challenge him on something. I can't keep my hands down. If it's too formal to interrupt him right on the spot, I'll sit there gnashing my mental teeth and try to compose the dirtiest, meanest, most embarrassing question I can contrive. Oh, you can ask terrible questions of speakers using the old technique of asking, "Have you stopped beating your mother yet?" Whether he says yes or no, you have him cornered. Almost always, you can employ -- almost always, you can employ this technique on any topic that he may be unfolding. If it doesn't fit, sometimes I'll know a bit of evidence that contradicts something he's just reported, and I'll sit there mentally building myself a great rebuttal speech to give as soon as he sits down. Too many times in my life, at the end of a good speech, I've leaped to my feet, hurled my embarrassing question at the speaker, or made my great rebuttal effort, only to find him looking at me in complete astonishment and saying, "Well, Nichols, didn't you hear what I went on to say when I explained that so-and-so was also true?" I hadn't. When I get overstimulated, my listening efficiency drops to a zero percent level, and that's where it is most of the time.
This is a horrible habit, so bad that in big, bold letters across the top of the blackboards, we like to print the words of this maxim: "Withhold evaluation until comprehension is complete." And if we're afraid they can't read very well, we put up there, "Hear the man out before you judge him." Most of us can't wait. The first time we shake hands with a stranger, we decide on the incident that the fellow's a nincompoop or well worth cultivating, and we're lucky to bat five hundred in this league of snap judgment making. We'd all be better off if we would withhold our decisions until we fully understood the people and their propositions.
Bad listening habit number four is listening only for facts. This is a curious business. I asked the one hundred worst listeners what they concentrated on when they listened. With pride, one hundred out of one hundred bad ones said, "We listened for the facts." The truth was, they got a few, garbled a shocking number, and completely lost the bulk of them. I then asked the one hundred best listeners what they concentrated on when they listened. Rather timidly, ninety-seven out of a hundred good ones said, "Well, we tried to get the main ideas out of it." "What do you mean by that?" "Well," they said, "when a man's giving a talk, he's almost always developing some kind of a principle or concept. We try to understand the central ideas as best we can." We pursued this facet of good listening with meticulous care, as you may well imagine. We hadn't chased it far before we became completely convinced that the good listener is always the idea listener. He does pretty well grasp the central ideas in each discourse he hears. He uses these as connecting threads to give sense and system to the whole talk, and after as few as forty-eight hours have gone by, he has more facts appended to his connecting threads than the sponges and cataloguers of facts only are able to retain for even two days' time. Even if it's facts we want, the best way to get them is to get first the principle that limits and controls them.
Bad listening habit number five is trying to make an outline out of everything we hear. Now, this too, I think, is very curious business. I asked the one hundred worst listeners what they did for note-taking. One hundred out of one hundred bad ones said, "We make an outline, of course." They thought note-taking and outlining were synonyms. Well, there's nothing wrong, I guess, with outlining a speech if the speaker is following an outline pattern of organization himself. I'll even concede that I think he should be. But between this morning and the day they put you and me in our caskets for all eternity, I would estimate that not more than half the talks we're going to hear are going to be given by speakers carefully following an outline pattern of organization. And if they are not, one of the most frustrating things in our culture is to try to outline the un-outlineable. I've watched students do this many times. Always, they become engrossed in symmetry. They get the borders around the four sides of the note page exactly right. Content is neatly centered. Sometimes I think they cite down the left-hand margin to get all the indentations exactly right, and after each of their outline symbols, they painfully inscribe a few words of meaningless jargon. Two months later, reviewing this truck, trying to get ready for the final examination, they spend about ninety percent of their review period trying to figure out, "What in thunder was I thinking about when I wrote down that outline?" This is stupid business.
I asked the one hundred best listeners what they did for note-taking. They said, "Well, it all depends on the speaker, of course." "What do you mean by that?" "Well," they said, "we don't take any notes till we see what we're in for. If the man's organized, maybe we'll outline him. Most of them aren't. We've never yet heard a lecture in chemistry, physics, or biology you could outline. The scientists don't even think that way." And they started talking about the precis system for taking notes, the abstract system, the annotation system, the fact versus principle system. That last one fascinated me. Takes two sheets of paper instead of one. On the top line of one sheet, you write the word "facts." On the top line of the opposite sheet, you write the word "principles." Then you kind of lean back in your seat and you say, "[inaudible] mister, if you can," and you wait for the speaker to turn up one or the other. If he produces one of these articles, you simply make a vertical listing of it in column form on the appropriate page.
I decided to give this system a try-out myself. I went in to hear a speech. I had two blank sheets of notebook paper, and I came out with two blank sheets of notebook paper. There's a real beauty in that; you save -- you save a lot of energy that way. Furthermore, you expose a phony. You'd never go back to hear the character a second time; he didn't have anything to say. I decided to give the system one more try-out. I went in to hear a lecture by a man named T.R. McConnell, an expert in the psychology of learning. He hadn't talked two minutes before I realized that this man was a machine, or maybe there was a little elf down in his abdomen turning the handle of a corn sheller. Out of the horn of that sheller, his mouth, there flowed a constant stream of facts and ideas. When he got done that day, I had forty facts on my fact page I'd never heard of before, two or three principles on the opposing sheet well worth thinking about. I went back to hear him again and again. I never heard that man McConnell talk that I didn't come up with between twenty and forty facts new to me, two or three principles well worth reflecting upon. This was an adventure in learning, an exciting kind of experience I'd had too few times in my personal background.
Now, there are other beauties in this way of taking notes. If you have to take an examination over the content, you have the perfect ingredients for review before the final exam. You can get an A grade in almost any course you'll ever take if you know how to spend the last night -- last four hours before the exam. Pick up your accumulated fact sheets, read through them just as fast as you can go without trying to memorize them, and turn them face down. Pick up your principle sheets and spend five minutes on each of the principles you've collected, thinking about its meaning, its interpretation, its application. Turn them down. Read through the fact sheets again as fast as you can go. Spend four hours in this alternating routine, and you're ready for the professor. He can't beat you. When you get into that examination, you're going to discover [inaudible] that the man who grinds out this kind of grist is also an expert test builder. He's likely to have one objective test item on practically every fact he's covered during the semester, and you will recognize them and get them right. He's probably going to have between five and ten questions on each of the principles he's covered during the semester, too, and you'll get the bulk of those right. Even if he wants an essay-type answer, you can whip him. You can beat that professor by weaving into your little essay a large portion of the factual and conceptual material you've been accumulating through this way of taking notes. Oh, the effective listener is a flexible, adaptable note-taker. He's a fellow who adapts his note-taking organization to the organization the speaker is following, or the complete absence of any such organization at all. Another beauty of this fact versus principle technique is that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference, apparently, whether the speaker is organized or confused. You could still screen out of any speaker's discourse his facts and his principles if he puts any in there in the first place.
Bad listening habit number six is faking attention to the speaker. For many years teaching school, if I would look out across the classroom and see the bulk of my students staring up at me from this pose, I've always been inclined to make a mental note to myself and say, "Look at this professor, they all have you tuned in this morning." We now know that one of the surest indexes to inattention in our whole culture is this posture on the part of a listener. Having paid the speaker the overt courtesy of appearing to tune him in, this one now feels conscience-free to take off on any one of a thousand mental tangents, and that's probably where he's gone. If you ever face a group yourself and see the bulk of the people staring up at you from this position, for heaven's sake, stop short your discourse, tell everybody to stand up, do some calisthenics [inaudible] to get the blood circulating again. Good listening is not relaxed and passive at all. It's characterized by a quicker beating of the heart, faster circulation of blood, small rise in bodily temperature. It's energy-burning and energy-consuming. In plain words, it's hard work. The best meaning of the word "attention" is a collection of tensions inside the listener that can be resolved only by getting some facts or ideas the speaker is trying to convey.
Bad listening habit number seven is tolerating or creating distractions out in the audience. Sometimes you'll be at the back of a huge audience, and there may be a noisy little clique right around you jabbering away so loudly you can't hear the man up front. Should you submit to this? Never, in my judgment. I think you immediately ought to wave an arm violently at the speaker and in your loudest roar bellow at him, "Mister, can't hear you back here! Mind if we wave whenever you get inaudible?" There's only one answer he can make: "Yes." To thank you for your interest and turn on the decibels of intensity. One absolute obligation every speaker carries is the obligation of audibility. If the stupid man doesn't know it, force him into a recognition of it. If you don't like my first option, try this one: glower fiercely at the people right around you making the noise and suddenly scream at them, "Quiet!" Then look very intently up at the speaker, and it usually has quite a salutary effect on the situation.
Bad listening habit number eight is evading difficult material. This one is critical. I asked the one hundred worst listeners about their radio and TV experiences. Not one of those bad listeners had ever sat clear through the program called "Chicago Roundtable," "Invitation to Learning," "Town Meeting of the Air," "Meet the Press," "See It Now," "You Are There." Instead, they had become authorities on Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and The Lone Ranger. I asked the one hundred best listeners about this. They knew who Bob Hope was, but several times in their lives had sat through some of these more challenging programs. You take a youngster who has never heard anything more difficult than Bob Hope, put him in an auditorium like this one with three or four hundred other -- others of his mates, trot out the best professor of chemistry on your faculty, and let him start to talk. He cannot talk two minutes before the Bob Hope type listener is saying, "Gee, who is this guy talking about? Don't even dig this stuff." In panic, he beats it for the admissions office at the end of the first class period, cancels the course in chemistry, and puts in one maybe in economics, just about as rough over there. The poor kid is inundated; he's over his depth, and he knows it. He washes right out of college and is gone. Is it important? For every two young people starting college in America today, one washes out before the end of the sophomore year, usually before the end of the freshman year. At the other end of most of our four-year curriculums, for every one young man we can hand a four-year degree, there are two companies standing there bidding free services. Fifty percent mortality on the intake; we meet half the demand for our product on the outgo. I get worried about this. If the reports I've read coming back from Moscow have any accuracy to them at all, the Russians are losing fewer than five percent of their high-ability crop of eighteen-year-olds every fall. Persistently, by contrast, we lose just fifty percent of our high-ability crop of eighteen-year-olds every fall. I don't know how long we can stay in the ball game with them, with this unnecessary drain of potential brain power. I say unnecessary because it's my conviction that if we would spend ten minutes a week only, teaching our youngsters how to become better listeners, we would not have that great washout at the college freshman level. If for twelve years through the grades we spent ten minutes a week on how to learn better through the ears, these young people could learn to get their feet under them, mentally speaking, and could adapt to the tougher vocabularies hurled in their direction in the college classroom, it would be a big and a good investment for us.
Bad listening habit number nine is letting emotion-laden words get between us and the speaker. Now, this is a curious business, but it is a fact that a single word may have such an emotional load to it that it will cause the listener to tune the speaker right out. I ran into this accidentally several years ago. I was giving a talk to a large group of freshmen about the nature of speech, and I said something like this to the group: "You know, man was never born to be a speaking animal in the first place. We have twenty-six organs in the midline of our bodies we use to talk with. Every one of them was put inside us for a more primitive biological purpose than talking, for such things as breathing, chewing, swallowing, and the like. Probably by plain accident, some old Stone Age man made a grunt of some kind, was pleased with his product, and with it initiated through a long process of evolution the development of the code that we now call speech."
I saw some frozen looks out front. I happen to have a long test over that particular lecture, and when I scored the papers, I discovered that my freshmen had missed a whole cluster of items right after the one that dealt with the evolutionary character of speech. Curious, I had interviews with them trying to find out what had happened. To my astonishment, I discovered that four out of every ten of my freshmen had been taken aside by their parents before being allowed to enroll in that big university down there, had been warned that that university faculty is full of atheists, and these atheistic professors may try to undermine your religion for you, they'd been told. And one way you can identify an atheist is when he starts talking about evolution. Those little rascals had decided I was an atheist because I used the word "evolution" in a lecture. It infuriates me; I'm a Methodist. Well, I learned one thing that fall: you can't use the word "evolution" when you talk to freshmen on my campus without reaching up and switching out [inaudible] forty percent of your audience. I now say to them, "Speech is a long developmental process," and they don't tend to tune me out with the word "developmental."
Three years ago, I had a talk to give at a retail sales convention down in Lincoln, Nebraska. My audience that night was all female, and I kept saying to the ladies there, "You clerks know what I mean. You clerks must have had these experiences right in your own stores." They froze up on me. At the end of my talk, five women, all abreast, came right at me out of the front pew, and they said, "We are not clerks." I said, "What do you like to be called?" She said, "We are retail sales personnel. If you don't like that, you may call us sales ladies, but we're not clerks." I learned a bitter truth that night: don't ever call a female a clerk; she'll hate you for it. I don't know what's wrong with the word, but it's a fighting word for some reason or other.
I wish I could tell you this morning all the words that automatically cause vast numbers of listeners to reach up and switch the speaker right off. I can't do it. We've pinned down six or eight that I'd like to give you that we are certain do that horrible job. One of the worst words in our language seems to be the word "mother-in-law." Forty percent of all males black out completely if the speaker happens to use the word. Some other very bad words are "pink," "fellow-traveler," "square," "think," "dirty Jew," "dirty n*****," "Harry Truman." [Laughter] These are all words that have caused great numbers of listeners to black out completely when the speaker happened to drop one on them. What a silly, silly business. After all, the word is not the thing itself; it's merely a symbol for it. Yet, on and on you and I go through our lives letting symbols get between us and self-growth. I wish somebody'd come along and do a PhD somewhere and at some university designed to identify the one hundred greatest word barriers to learning in the English language. If we knew what these one hundred demons were, we could graduate them according to their difficulty, lay them out in the classrooms of the nation, and put these stupid barriers behind us.
Bad listening habit number ten is, by all odds, the most important of all ten. I've
saved it to last for that reason. It's a little tricky and you'll have to tune me in or you'll miss it. It's wasting the differential between speech speed and thought speed.
Now on the average in America we talk a hundred twenty-five words a minute conversationally, but put a man in front of an audience and ask him to talk informatively and he slows down to one hundred words a minute right on the nose. How fast two people listen, or to put the question a little better, how many words a minute do people think as they listen, if all their thoughts were measurable in words per minute.
Three kinds of research I wish I had time to describe to you in detail all point to the same conclusion. Easy cruising speed of thought in any audience you and I will ever face will always average at least four hundred words a minute. Now the differential between one hundred and four hundred is a snare, a pitfall, and a delusion. It's a breeder of false security and a breeder of mental tangents.
What actually happens is what's been happening to me for the past forty minutes, you've been tuning me in. In ten seconds I've been able to identify what I was up to and you feel free to rip out for a fifty-second mental holiday which you took. Then, because you came here and invested some energy you occasionally checked me in again in ten seconds found out what I was up to now and you ripped out for another fifty-second holiday. You're in for ten out for fifty, in for ten out -- really it isn't so bad if you always come back for the ten, but sooner or later on one of the mentally excursions of yours you may hit upon a topic to engrossing to drop.
In your instances, I'm not certain what that would be, but I think I know what it always is in the mind of a typical college male. He goes to his engineering class, the old professor stumbles out drawing a big mock-up along behind him. He turns and flowers at the group and he says, [inaudible], you birds think you're gonna make engineers? Some of you will, still gonna flunk a couple of you and I think you know which two I'm talking about.
Be that as it may, if you make a success in this chosen career of yours it's only going to be possible if you've learned one fundamental thing on this campus, that thing is that the most precious item an engineer of her owns, a thing with which he must learn to eat, sleep, live, and die at his side is his slide rule, thus I brought out my big slide rule this morning, I'm going to review with you all the mathematic computations possible with this instrument.
What are the engineers thinking? That old goat, gonna spend another fifty minutes on that stupid thing? We've been around it sixteen times in other classes I got [inaudible] as a junior in high school the first time, tuning him in. Sure enough the old man is multiplying one-digit numbers [inaudible] slide rule. Immediately the kid gags mentally and thinks what'll I do with that soft tire in my Ford, when I put the car in the lot this morning I noticed the right rear tire was half down. If that cursed thing is clear flat at the end of the period, do I shift her between classes or let her sit there half a day? He frets over that problem for fifty seconds, checks in on the professor who is now multiplying two-digit numbers out of [inaudible] slide rule.
Again the kid gags mentally quickly and says what am I going to do about that chemistry test Monday morning, holy mackerel, I've got to get this one cold. He frets over that problem for fifty seconds, checks in on the professor who is now dividing one-digit numbers on the big slide rule. The poor kid is in and out about six times and then on one of the outs a very important question comes to his attention, which woman am I going to call for a date Saturday night, he wonders.
Mentally, he runs over the various possibilities he earlier had listed in the back of his notebook. He stops at the name Susan, he's had Susan out several times on weekends, he remembers that she's plump and jolly, laughs and giggles a lot. You can always have a good time out with Suze. He recalls that she usually fixes something good to eat at the end of the evening, that comes free and that's good too. He sits there kind of reveling in the idea of another Saturday night out with Susan.
All of a sudden a very dramatic possibility comes to his cortical centers. Wonder if I could rate a date with that Martha something or other, transferred in you're from Concordia, I think it was. Holy Moses what a female. I never seen a woman like that before in my life. When she walks it's just like watching a snake crawl. This lad, this lad is off on a mental tangent from which there's no return.
The next thing he hears, the next thing he hears is the bell at the end of the hour. When the bell rings he hears the old professor saying, remember when you take [inaudilble] chokehold on a slide rule. In panic, he grabs some mate going out the back door and says, what's with this guy, how do you take [inaudible] he doesn't know either. He was out on some other mental tangent.
This is why you and I listen with twenty-five percent efficiency only when we listen. It is because we are a bunch of Island hoppers, we hop from one island of attention to another and while we're on land we do very well. Most of the time we're in transit, don't even hear what the man says, but if you can think four times faster than any man can talk and I know you can.
Deliberately this morning I've been trying to talk two hundred words a minute instead of one hundred for two reasons. One, I wanted to cover twice as much material that way. Two, I wanted to eat up some of the differential between my slow bumbling speech speed and your rapid thought speed and it hasn't done me lick of good. Even, even if I got to the two hundred word a minute rate average cruising speed of thought of this particular audience in this particular room this morning will run well over eight hundred words a minute. You wanted to go somewhere four times faster than I could travel.
No doubt it's been a handicap to both of us, but if you can think four times faster than any man ever talks that should not be a liability for heaven's sake, it ought to be the proudest asset we own. The heart of listening training in America where it best operates is simply the business of converting. What appears to be a liability over into an asset, that conversion can be made.
To make it, what we must do is to make automatic the practice of three mental activities every time we hear sustained speech. I call these three things the ingredients of concentration. Ingredient number one is to anticipate the speaker's point before he makes it. Always run ahead of the speaker down the thread of his discourse and guess what his next point is likely to be. Think of it with a capital letter attached if you guess his next point is A and it comes out A, you're in the money. A now comes to your brain twice instead of once learning is much reinforced.
What if you guess wrong. Suppose you guess his next point is Z and it comes out A, you're still in the money. Out of curiosity alone the great bulk of us begin to compare Z with A. If we do, we're applying one of the three oldest laws of learning in the college textbook, which is that man learns best by contrast and comparison with something else. This is the one wager we never lose. We're always the winner in our culture. If we anticipate the speaker's point before he makes it, check up to see whether we have guessed right or wrong.
Ingredient of concentration number two is to identify what he has for evidence. No longer can speakers in America go through their lives just as certain points they have to build them be able to identify the bricks, the mortar, the steel, and the wood with which the speaker constructs, each point that he submits. It'll give us a better foundation upon which to accept or reject his proposition later on and it'll lead up to our own advantage a little more of the differential between speech speed and thought speed.
The third ingredient of concentration is the most important of the three. It is to recapitulate periodically as we listen. The good listener will listen hard four or five minutes, then declare a quick mental timeout. In that timeout interval he'll hastily summarize the best points made in the preceding segment of discourse. In ten seconds time at that enormous thought speed of ours we can rephrase in our mind the best points made in five minutes of preceding talk. Half a dozen of these mental summaries interspersed throughout a fifty-minute lecture just double our ability to understand and to recall its content. These are big dividend payers. We ought to cash them in and make them work for us.
It's a matter of great satisfaction to me that the greatest teacher who ever lived, Christ himself, had something to say on this topic. At the end of one of his best sermons, reported in the fourth chapter of Mark 23rd and 24th verses, Christ said to the people before him, if any man have ears to hear, let him hear. With what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you and unto you who hear shall more be given, which summarizes very well the thought that I'd like to leave in your minds. [Applause]