Hardy Annual

That hardy annual, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, came up for review once more, this time at the hands of Graham Hubbard. With this speech, I thought there was too much narrative and uninteresting detail. Graham has potentially a good voice but did not use it well. He was unfortunately, somewhat hesitant, and did not remember his speech as well as he would have wished. It was a speech which had no peaks, though the speaker seemed to warm up to his subject about half way through. He related Schweitzer to missionaries in general, their work and their troubles, but did not attempt oratory. He fell into the old trap of tolling a funny story; it was quite a good funny story, but the audience sensed it coming and waited to see how it illustrated Schweitzer's character; the audience was disappointed. The two lessons to be learned from this are: (a) don't let your audience know a "Joke" is coming; and (b) only use a Joke when it illustrates your theme—the theme in this case being Schweitzer's character. Highlight of the speech. I thought, was the description of Schweitzer as a man. "trying to be part of the answer, not part of the problem."