Andrew Carnegie’s rules for speaking:
- Make yourself perfectly at home before your audience, and simply talk to them, not at them.
- Do not try to be somebody else; be your own self and talk, never “orate” until you can’t help it.
As a boy he’d joined a debating club, and “I know of no better mode of benefiting a youth than joining such a club as this. … The self-possession I afterwards came to have before an audience may very safely be attributed to the experience of the ‘Webster Society.'”
(From his autobiography.)