Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Improving Interviewing And Conversational Skills Using "Speed Interviewing", Colleen Arendt

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

A great deal of research focuses on the importance of effective interviewing skills across professions and interpersonal settings. This activity, based on “speed dating,” is designed to improve students’ interviewing skills. Specifically, the activity develops listening and probing skills by having students conduct mini interviews without preparation. The lack of preparation forces students to rely only on their listening and probing skills instead of an interview protocol. To increase difficulty, the questions can be tailored to employment or internship interviews to help the interviewees prepare while their partners practice listening and asking probing questions. This activity can also be modified ...

"I Don't Always Look At Memes, But When I Do, It's For A Class": Using Memes To Demonstrate Language Rules, Jocelyn M. Degroot, Hannah Coy

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

This activity uses Internet memes to demonstrate the pervasiveness of language rules and culture’s effect on language in online culture. Numerous introductory communication courses include a discussion on verbal communication that focuses on language rules and the effects of culture on verbal communication. The most relevant language rules for memes are the regulative rules that guide action and how we use language (Cronen, Pearce, & Harris, 1979). In this exercise, students analyze and evaluate language rules present in popular online memes. The students identify the language rule utilized in each of a pre-chosen set of Internet memes and generate at ...

Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety: Practical Applications For Classroom Instruction, Joshua N. Westwick

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

During the 2013 Speech Communication Association of South Dakota annual conference, there was a lively discussion surrounding students’ Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA). During the dialogue, numerous strategies on how to help reduce students’ speaking anxiety were discussed. However, I was surprised at the number of suggestions that refuted tested and proven strategies for PSA reduction. Moreover, I was startled and dismayed to hear comments such as “I have just given up and allowed my students to read from a manuscript” or “the only way I can get [my students] to stay calm is when I allow them to write as ...

So, You’Re A New Forensics Coach?: Establishing An Oral Interpretation Program And Culture Of Success, Barb Kleinjan

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

As many new English and Speech instructors quickly realize, their first teaching contract will most certainly include forensic extra-curricular activities. By the simple virtue of training to become fine arts teachers, administrators and principals may assign the coaching of Debate, One Act Plays or Oral Interpretation to their contracts, even though the individual may have had no experience in any of those activities. In my first secondary school contract, I was required to coach Oral Interpretation, three One Act Plays and the spring All School Play. My drama background consisted of a knowledge and appreciation for Shakespeare, yet with no ...

Speech Analysis Paper [Communication Studies], Nancy Bandiera

Open Educational Resources

This assignment was used in a Public Speaking course where students learned to build a variety of public speeches. The assignment aims to enable students to make connections to experience, to reflect and self-asses their learning. In line with the integrative learning core competency, they are also encouraged to make connections between and among academic disciplines. At the same time, it gives them the opportunity to broaden the possibilities for connections in their analyses, allowing them the ability to adapt & apply learning across diverse contexts.

LaGuardia’s Core Competencies and Communication Abilities

Main Course Learning Objectives:

• Students demonstrate their ability ...

The Public Sphere As Site Of Emancipation And Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique Of Digital Communication, David Ingram, Asaf Bar-Tura

David Ingram

Habermas claims that an inclusive public sphere is the only deliberative forum for generating public opinion that satisfies the epistemic and normative conditions underlying legitimate decision-making. He adds that digital technologies and other mass media need not undermine – but can extend – rational deliberation when properly instituted. This paper draws from social epistemology and technology studies to demonstrate the epistemic and normative limitations of this extension. We argue that current online communication structures fall short of satisfying the required epistemic and normative conditions. Furthermore, the extent to which Internet-based communications contribute to legitimate democratic opinion and will formation depends on the ...

Complete Issue 54(1)

Speaker & Gavel

Complete digitized issue (volume 54, issue 1) of Speaker & Gavel.

Darron Devillez: What Forensics Did For Me, Darron Devillez

Speaker & Gavel

ALUMNI CORNER: The forensic community is filled with alumni who will tout the benefits they received through their participation in intercollegiate speech and debate activities. As directors of forensics programs face battles for budgets and sometimes for their program’s very existence, having a collection of published testimonies about the positive influence of forensics can be a tremendous help. To that end, Speaker & Gavel is setting aside space in each issue for our alumni to talk about how forensics has helped them in their professional life. These are our alumni’s stories.

Suzanne Miller-Mcfeeley: What Forensics Did For Me, Suzanne Miller-Mcfeeley

Speaker & Gavel

ALUMNI CORNER: The forensic community is filled with alumni who will tout the benefits they received through their participation in intercollegiate speech and debate activities. As directors of forensics programs face battles for budgets and sometimes for their program’s very existence, having a collection of published testimonies about the positive influence of forensics can be a tremendous help. To that end, Speaker & Gavel is setting aside space in each issue for our alumni to talk about how forensics has helped them in their professional life. These are our alumni’s stories.

Justifying Debate As “Cerebral Gymnastics” And As “Glorification Of The Experience Of Play”: An Alternative To William Hawley Davis’S Rejection Of The “Debate As Gaming” Vision For Debate, Matthew P. Brigham

Speaker & Gavel

William Hawley Davis’s “Is Debate Primarily A Game?” (1916) represents an early, prominent effort to justify academic, intercollegiate debate and also, indirectly, societal debate. Davis sharply rebukes those who would conceptualize and/or practice academic debate as if it were a game, arguing instead for a version of debate that more closely approximates real democratic deliberation and thus cultivates the training necessary for meaningful public participation on serious issues. This essay explores other possible justifications for debate, including those that might re-claim play, game, and/or sport. Such alternatives suggest the importance of conceiving debate beyond tragic frames and ...

Recasting The Founding Fathers: The Tea Party Movement, Neoliberalism, And American Myth, Calvin Coker

Speaker & Gavel

This article analyzes representative texts from the Tea Party Movement (TPM), a conservative American political movement, to demonstrate the TPM uses the myth of the Founding Fathers as an argumentative strategy to craft and justify a sanitary neoliberal political project. The necessity of such of a project lies in the underlying democratic crisis of neoliberalism, a crisis navigated by the TPM through strategic use of political myth. Neoliberal policies require, in many instances, democratic consent, though those policies often serve to disenfranchise many of the groups supporting them. This essay argues the TPM uses myth for the purpose of creating ...

Meta-Analysis Of Research On The Functional Theory Of Political Campaign Discourse, William L. Benoit

Speaker & Gavel

Functional Theory has been applied to a variety of election campaign messages, including candidacy announcement speeches; TV spots; debates; direct mail brochures; candidate webpages; nomination acceptance addresses; vice presidential debates; senate, gubernatorial, and mayoral debates; senate, gubernatorial, and house TV spots; and debates and TV spots from other countries. This approach argues that election messages address one of three functions (acclaims, attacks, defenses) and one of two topics (policy, character). This study reports a meta-analysis of several Functional Theory predictions: acclaims are more common than attacks (defenses are consistently the least common function and were not tested here); policy is ...

Front Matter

Speaker & Gavel

Front matter and table of contents for volume 54, issue 1 of Speaker & Gavel.

Guide To The Pyschological Development Of Expression Collection, College Archives & Special Collections

Finding Aids

This guide describes the organization and scope of the Psychological Development of Expression books from the Columbia School of Oratory archival collection, housed within the College Archives and Special Collections at Columbia College Chicago. The Psychological Development of Expression is four-volume set of texts on expression, public speaking, and oratory for practical use by students of the Columbia School of Oratory in Chicago.

Stand Up, Speak Out: The Practice And Ethics Of Public Speaking, Leslie J. Harris

Communication Faculty Books

Stand Up, Speak Out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking is an open textbook adapted by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) authors for public speaking courses at UWM. The original work was produced under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NA-SA) in 2011 by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution. The UWM edition is adapted from the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing.

Understanding Discourse Transition, Taylor Weeks

Theses and Dissertations

This work is intended to explore and analyze the process of transition from one discourse to another different discourse.

Mechanisms And Implications Of Identity Hybridization In Online Advertorials, Christopher Lee Borntrager

Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the ways corporate-sponsored image advertorials published in online platforms construct identities for their sponsor. By analyzing 6 advertorials from The Guardian Online as well as a user comment thread on the same website using critical linguistic analysis and conversation analysis, respectively, this study suggests that the identities constructed in corporate-sponsored advertorials are a hybridized form, claiming both the goals of a corporation and the social legitimacy of a professional activist. To construct these hybrid identities, the advertorials in this sampling used specific linguistic strategies to demonstrate agency with regard to a specific social issue while seeming to ...

An Exploratory Study Of The Impact Of Language On The Transition And Success Of Students In Their First College Year, Kathryn B. Wilhite

Masters of Science in First Year Studies

ABSTRACT

In a time where colleges and universities are taking strides to consider their communication strategies with incoming students there appears to be a lack of attention on the language within communication pieces and what messages that language conveys to students. This study sought to examine this language through inductive analysis of four research questions which explored what the communication pieces are, what relationship they build, the discourse language present, and the strategies of empowerment language within the communication pieces distributed to all incoming first-year students at a large, public comprehensive four-year university in the Southeastern United States. Research on ...

An Ideological Criticism Of Todrick Hall's Visual Album Straight Outta Oz, Rachel Moss

SCOM Undergraduate Research Conference

American entertainer Todrick Hall released his visual album Straight Outta Oz in 2016 in order to communicate his views on a wide range of topics from sexuality to family life. Hall used the video to advance challenging ideologies that discuss the harmful effects of the church on LGBTQ+ youth, problems the LGBTQ+ community face, the discrimination faced by black Americans, and pitfalls of the entertainment industry, with the purpose of forming a call to action for society to advocate for equality. By placing these themes into a medium popular at the time of release, Hall created a better chance for ...

Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine, a coalition of small-scale farmers, consumers, and citizens building an alternative food system based on a distributed form of production, processing, selling, purchasing, and consumption. This distribution occurs at the municipal level through the enactment of ordinances. Using critical-rhetorical field methods, I argue that the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine develops a ‘constitutive’ rhetoric that composes rural society through affective relationships. Advocates engage the industrial food system to both expose its systemic bias against small-scale farming and construct their own discourse of belonging. Based upon agrarian values such as ...