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Everyone who speaks in public knows that hand gestures just go with the territory.
Effective public address requires that one gesture in appropriate ways and at
appropriate times in the course of speaking. Preachers know that very well.
Preachers or not, we are also aware that gesturing with the hands is an essential part
of the very fabric of conversational speech. Who among us could actually keep our
hands still during the course of an animated conversation?

To talk is to gesture. In fact, what is odd, and often disconcerting, is when
someone talks without gesturing. There is invariably something cold about that;
something seems wrong, incomplete, even untrustworthy when that happens.

What do gestures do? What are they for? Why do we use them?

What speech teachers since Aristotle and Cicero have taught us is that gestures are
an integral part of the communication process itself. Gestures help us
communicate. They enable us to give emphasis to particular words and phases.
They assist us in explaining things, since we can "draw," as it were, in the air.
Gestures can also supplement, often very powerfully, the emotions that we express
verbally, since our hands can also convey anger, or joy, or frustration, or any
number of other deep-seated feelings. Gestures are for communicating. We have
known that for a long time. The speaker who does not master the art of gesturing is
something less of a speaker than he or she could be.

Over the last few years, however, several new lines of research have been
undertaken with regard to gestures in communication--research that has particular
relevance for public speakers--among them preachers. Two of these sets of research
findings have recently been summarized in scientific journals.

In both cases, the research suggests that gestures are not JUST for communication
after all. Other important functions of gesturing are being uncovered.

The first is what appears to be a direct link between gestures and memory. While
we have little idea yet about how it works, or even how well it works, the evidence is
beginning to grow that our powers of recall are significantly improved . . . if, in our
effort to recall something we have learned, we gesture with our hands in the process
of talking with ourselves or others.

An important study of this was reported in a recent issue of the American Journal of
Psychology. Two researchers, working with several volunteer groups, asked the
subjects vocabulary questions; i.e., the meanings of words that all would be
expected to know. One group was allowed to think (and converse with the
questioner) with hands free and normal, gesturing as always in the speaking
interchange. However, members of the second group were asked the same
questions and allowed to think and converse--but without using their hands. They
were required to speak while holding onto a railing in front of them with both
hands.

Subjects for asked, for example, to name "an ancient instrument used for
calculations." Consistently, to the researchers' surprise, the subjects whose hands
were "hooked" to the railing were significantly less likely to come up with the word
"abacus" than those whose hands were free to gesture during the "thought"
process.

As the scientists would say, what we have here is a hypothesis; but a remarkably
interesting and promising one: that gesturing freely is an aid to remembering while
one is speaking.

The second study, in many ways, is even more significant and basic. It was
reported not long ago in the scientific journal, Nature. This time the researchers
wanted to know if gesturing while speaking is a learned trait, something acquired in
the process of watching others speak; or whether gesturing is an instinctual part of
human speech and thought.

To answer the question, the researchers worked with children and teenagers aged 8
to 18. The unique thing about the study was that half of the subjects were sighted,
while the other half had been blind since birth--meaning that it was impossible for
them to have seen anyone gesture while speaking. In several tests, the researchers
asked each young subject to explain certain concepts. For example, each was asked
to explain in any way he or she wished the relationship between an amount of water
placed in a glass and a bowl.

What the researchers found consistently was that the blind children--those who had
never seen others gesture before--gestured just as much as the sighted children as
they explained whether the glass or the bowl held more water. Moreover, the
researchers discovered that blind children still used vigorous hand gestures even
when the people they were talking to were also blind.

The bottom line is that the evidence is growing that gesturing and thinking are very
closely interwoven with each other. Gesturing is not a learned activity. It appears,
rather, to be integrally connected to the processes of reasoning, thinking and
problem-solving. Such mental activities, moreover, seem to be significantly
enhanced by gesturing.

It is true that there are people who, for various reasons, do not have the use of their
hands but still manage to think and communicate well. But we are learning that
gestures are about more than communication; they are also a part of the mind's very
activity in remembering and speaking. We think better, we remember better, and we
speak better when we gesture vigorously and well.

What does this mean for you, the preacher? Several things, briefly.

First, it means that, as a professional public speaker, you need to give attention to
improving your gesturing as you speak. Give free rein to your
gesturing--spontaneously, naturally, and as though you are engaged in a vigorous
across-the-table conversation. In fact, the next time you are in such an uninhibited
conversation, be keenly aware of the lively gesturing that is going on; and bring that
kind of gesturing to your pulpit.

Second, for preachers who read sermons from manuscripts, remembering what to
say is not an issue--which may, in small part, account for the difficulty most
manuscript preachers have in gesturing well. However, for preachers who work
with--or without--notes in the pulpit, working on good gesturing is a way of working
at remembering what one wants to say. That is not something that we have known
before. Undoubtedly, in the future, we will learn a great deal more about how this
works. But knowing the connection for now is of great value.

Finally, it is remarkable to realize that clear thinking and good gesturing in the
pulpit may really be part of each other. Up to now, gesturing has been considered
an "add on" in public address. You gesture so that people will get the message
better--a communication device that one "attaches" to what is being said. It
appears that it may be much, much more than that. We gesture to think well. We
gesture to remember better what we want to say. We gesture to speak more clearly.
Good gesturing is every bit as much an aid to the speaker, the preacher, as it is to
the listener!

--Joseph M. Webb