Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Better Pleasing The Court: How The American Collegiate Moot Court Association Can Improve Its Competition, Alan R. Gray Jr.

National Forensic Journal

The American Collegiate Moot Court Association strives to educate undergraduates about the American legal system through participation in moot court, a simulated oral argument before an appellate court. Its competition structure, however, suffers from defects that undermine the educational value of the event. This article argues that the ACMCA ought to adopt certain reforms in its operational structure, including geographically locking its regional competitions, abandoning its practice of power-matching preliminary rounds, and rewriting its judging ballot. These goals would not only enhance the quality of the legal education received by its participants, but improve students’ forensic learning experience as well.

The Impact Of Competition In Forensics On Future Careers, Jace Thomas Lux

Dissertations

Each year, thousands of college students participate in forensics (competitive speech and debate). Despite previous studies that identify numerous benefits to forensics participation, the activity is often eliminated from college campuses due to financial constraints. Although previous literature identifies the benefits of forensics participation to competitors, these studies do not address the lasting impact of college forensics participation on the careers of former competitors.

This exploratory study sought to identify the forensics outcomes that former competitors felt are used most frequently in their current careers, as well as the amount of emphasis forensics programs are placing on teaching these particular …

Manager-In-Chief: Applying Public Management Theory To Examine White House Chief Of Staff Performance, David B. Cohen, Justin S. Vaughn, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

In an effort to examine the causal determinants of performance dynamics for the administrative presidency, we apply empirical public management theory to White House administration to explain managerial performance. Utilizing original survey data that measures the perceptions of former officials from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, we conduct quantitative analyses to determine the extent to which a chief of staff’s background, relationship with the president, and internal as well as external management approaches shape overall perceptions of White House administrative efforts. We find that managerial dimensions matter considerably when explaining the dynamics of White House organizational performance.

Kickin’ Sand And Tellin’ Lies Performance Program, Jenaveve Linabary

Kickin' Sand and Tellin' Lies: The Play

This document is the program created for the Linfield College Theatre’s November 2012 production of Kickin’ Sand and Tellin’ Lies by Jackson B. Miller and Christopher Forrer. The play was created as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project, which focuses on the historical and contemporary role of dory fishers and dories in the life of the coastal village of Pacific City, Oregon. Inspired by stories from the project interviews, the play is a fictional work.

The program provides details related to the production, including a cast list and short actor biographies, listings …

Prompt Book: Kickin’ Sand And Tellin’ Lies, Jennifer Layton

Kickin' Sand and Tellin' Lies: The Play

This document is the prompt book created by stage manager Jennifer Layton for the Linfield College Theatre's November 2012 production of Kickin’ Sand and Tellin’ Lies by Jackson B. Miller and Christopher Forrer. The prompt book includes ground plans with blocking diagrams that depict the movements of the actors throughout the play, notations that indicate the timing for lighting, sound, and multimedia cues called by the stage manager during performances, and administrative materials such as rehearsal schedules, lists of stage properties and costume pieces, and other documents related to the process of creating the production.

Operating The Silencer: Muted Group Theory In The Great Gatsby, Sarah Funderbruke

Masters Theses

This master's thesis examines gender and social roles seen in dialogue in the American classic novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The researcher conducted a coding and rhetorical analysis to determine if elements of muted group theory were in the novel. Muted group theory was developed by Edwin and Shirley Ardener after their research indicated that a culture's values and social structure were voiced through rhetoric. The theory states that dominance in certain groups mutes, or silences, others from communicating effectively. Five passages from The Great Gatsby were selected for this analysis. These passages highlighted dialogue between the …

Sitting With Oprah, Dancing With Ellen: Presidents, Daytime Television, And Soft News, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

On July 29, 2010, President Barack Obama took to the air on "The View" to talk politics, policy, and family. Pundits billed the visit as the first time a sitting U.S. president appeared in a daytime television program. The telecast drew about 6.7 million viewers, the highest rating ever for the show, and garnered the largest number of women viewers in 17 months. However, whether and to what extent Obama succeeded in getting his message out and endearing himself to female voters remains an open question that merits further scholarly inquiry. In this chapter, I put Obama’s visit to "The …

“What Need Is There Of Words?” The Rhetoric Of Lű'S Annals (Lűshi Chunqiu), Mary M. Garrett

Communication Faculty Research Publications

This essay introduces Lű's Annals (Lűshi chunqiu), a classical Chinese text with a wealth of material on rhetoric. Not only does the text evaluate numerous examples of persuasion and sophistry, it also lays out a system of rhetorical precepts grounded in a distinctive ontology, that of correlative cosmology. After outlining the cosmology, epistemology, and theory of language of Lű's Annals, I trace how these shape its rhetorical theory and practices. I then consider how the text itself works as a persuasive artifact in the light of its own strictures. The essay closes with some reflections on why this valuable resource …

Cmst Connect, Vol. 5, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2012, St. Cloud State University

CMST Connect

Contents of this issue:

• Letter from the Chair: Dr. Jeff Ringer
• CMST Advisory Council: Creating Connection through Conversation, by Lindsey Rogers
• Featured Professor: Dr. Bassey Eyo
• New Faculty: Dr. Soumia Bardhan
• Featured Student Organization: Players Performance Group
• Where are They Now? Trevor Gohner, George Henkemeyer, Shireen Sarah Ghorbani, Michael T'Kach

The Right Call: Baseball Coaches' Attempts To Influence Umpires, Kevin Warneke, David C. Ogden

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

On-field conversations and confrontations between baseball coaches and umpires have long been a part of the game. An umpire's decision can alter the course of the game, but little has been written about the exchanges between a coach or manager and umpire, especially in relation to theoretical considerations. This study applies management and leadership theories in exploring the strategies baseball coaches use to contest an umpire's decision. By using leadership scholar John E. Barbuto's concept of influence tactics and the various types of social power discussed by sociologists John R. French and Bertram Raven, the study also tests the congruence …

Politics Or Policy? How Rhetoric Matters To Presidential Leadership Of Congress, José Villalobos, Justin Vaughn, Julia Azari

José D. Villalobos

In this study, we examine the linkage between presidential policy proposal messages and legislative success. Employing a dataset on presidential legislative proposals that covers the years 1949-2010, we find that politics matters less than policy. Purely political messages that reference the electoral logic of mandates or appeal to a sense of bipartisanship appear to have no impact on presidential legislative success, nor does policy signaling, though highlighting the role of agency-based policy experts in crafting legislation does. From these results, we conclude that although the way presidents communicate their messages to Congress represents an important component of presidential-legislative relations, it …

The Policy Czar Debate, Justin S. Vaughn, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

Presidential policy czars have been an important and powerful component of President Barack Obama’s approach to management and leadership in the first part of his time in office. By using czars, the President has been able to demonstrate the importance of policy issues, both to his own agenda and to the broader political system. In this chapter, we find that performance outcomes for these czars have been a mixed bag, with as many stories of success to report as tales of frustration and failure. As such, we posit that the cost of czars, in political and organizational terms, has outweighed …

Transcript Of The Kiwanda Fish Company, Kristina Hogevoll, Martin Knopf

All Story Transcripts

This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Kristina Hogevoll briefly describes her family’s first fishing company in Pacific City and then describes, in great detail, the work involved in their second, larger company, the Kiwanda. Marty Knopf describes how the Kiwanda Fish Company looked out for all the fishermen and how that contributed to the special Pacific City dory community.

Efficacy Of A Basic Public Speaking Course Delivered Via A Virtual Community College, Stephen Bradley Bailey

Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to: (a) determine if taking the basic public speaking course in face-to-face, hybrid, and online format statistically significantly reduces public speaking anxiety; (b) determine which course format, if any, reduces public speaking anxiety to the greatest extent; (c) determine if students’ satisfaction with learning is statistically significantly different in the three course formats; (d) determine faculty’s perceptions of students learning in the basic public speaking in the three course formats.

Pre- and post-data were collected from 263 participants taking the basic public speaking course in a virtual community college in January 2012 and in …

Extending Story Listening As A Practice Of Communal Formation At The Lake Orion Church Of Christ, Eric R. Magnusson

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This doctor of ministry thesis presents the results of a project that explores the potential for extending a practice of story listening as a way of forming community across social circles at the Lake Orion Church of Christ in Lake Orion, Michigan. The intervention involved guiding a group of six participant-researchers, each of whom had previous experience in story listening, through six sessions in the fall of 2011. Each phase of the project was informed by a participatory social Trinitarian theology. The first three sessions were designed to empower participant-researcher pairs to facilitate story listening groups of four to five …

Lincoln Speeches, Allen C. Guelzo, Richard Beeman

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today’s public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer’s art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize—the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the “House Divided” Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address—to …

Remembering Arkansas Debate: The Use Of Collective Memory In Analyzing The Role Of Intercollegiate Debate At The University Of Arkansas, Barry John Regan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As one of the most successful organizations on campus for nearly a century, the University of Arkansas debate team created many memories and stories from their time in competition. According to the framework of collective memory, the production and dissemination of these stories is what connects the past, present, and future of a debate team together.

I first reconstruct the history of debate at universities, beginning with development of debate at the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. I then detail the history of debate and argumentation at American universities, including the first intercollegiate debate in 1881. I then …

Daniel Hannan, Thomas Paine, And The Rhetoric Of Outrage, Danae Brack

Masters Theses

The purpose of this rhetorical study is to examine the textual charisma of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Daniel Hannan's speech "The Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government" and how that charisma made these artifacts successful in spreading outrage surrounding the historical and political events of their respective eras. The author uses Weber's theory of charisma filtered through Rosenberg and Hirschberg's expanded theory identifying lexical charisma, or the charisma of messages. The author analyzes Paine's and Hannan's use of persuasiveness, believability, and powerfulness, translating each of these characteristics into specific cues that can be identified in the individual texts. …

Transcript Of Creating The Dory Days Posters, Carol M. Johnson

All Story Transcripts

This story is an excerpt from an interview collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. The on-the-spot interview was conducted on the beach at Cape Kiwanda during Dory Days 2012. In this story, Carol Miles Johnson, Pacific City artist and dorywoman, describes the inspiration and process involved in the design of her series of Dory Days posters, which she began creating in 2004.

Launching Through The Surf: The Dory Fleet Of Pacific City, Cassidy Davis, Jennifer Layton

2012 Projects

The Keck Summer Collaborative Research Program provides opportunities for Linfield College students and faculty to conduct research on issues related to the Pacific Northwest, and to bring the research findings back into the classroom within the subsequent academic year. Students partner with faculty to conduct research and present their work to other students, Linfield staff and faculty, and community members during a series of brown bag lunches. Cassidy Davis and Jennifer Layton conducted research with Tyrone Marshall and gave this presentation during the summer of 2012.

This phase of Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City consists …

Reinterpreting Nuclear Consequences: Realism, Constructivism, And The Iranian Crisis, Harrison Diamond

International Political Economy Theses

The mainstream neoconservative perception of the persisting global conflict surrounding Iran’s nuclear program generally casts the nation as pursuing nuclear weaponry with the nefarious intentions of undermining western security interests and using these capabilities against Israel or European nations. Conversely, realist and constructivist scholars suggest that Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons is anything but irrational. Instead, Iran’s foreign policy represents a logical reaction to regional insecurities and collective identity formed by Iran’s history of past glory and subsequent marginalization, the mutual distrust between the U.S. and Iran following the ousting of the Shah, and Iran’s domestic political dynamics all …

Winning The Story War: Strategic Communication And The Conflict In Afghanistan, George Dimitriu

George Dimitriu

In conflicts of the information age success in the application of force depends less on the outcome of tactical operations on the battlefields but more on how the war's purpose, course and conduct is viewed by public opinion at home as well as within the theatre of operations. Therefore western allies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not only involved in a physical struggle but also in a struggle over perceptions, for no long-term engagement of troops is possible without support from home, nor can a counterinsurgency succeed without the support of the local population. While the ability to exert influence …

Love To Sign, Courtney Walker

Digital Community Voices Committee

My name is Courtney Walker and I'm a sophomore, president, and founder of the American Sign Language club. I made this video to show the world about American Sign Language and how amazing it is. It is its own culture and language that needs to be showed to everyone and the world that the Deaf are people to and we should adapt to incorporate them into society as well as the blind. I wanted to firstly thank my high school American Sign Language Robin Mengual for getting me into sign language,it's such a blessing. Secondly I want to thank my …

Sex And Politics: The Genre Of Apologia In Political Sex Scandals, Margeaux Thea Harris

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

The Initiation Of Growth-Focused Relationships Involving Healthy Accountability At The Carbondale Church Of Christ, Stephen Shaffer

Doctor of Ministry Theses

After several years of transition, the Carbondale Church of Christ is in the early stages of becoming a spiritual growth-focused community. However, the emerging growth community appears to reflect the prevailing cultural assumptions that growth is a personal, private, and an individual task. To shape this emergent growth culture, this project initiated a group of congregational opinion leaders, organized in pairs, into the practice of growth-focused relationships involving healthy accountability. The initiation involved a theological orientation followed by a four-week healthy accountability praxis.

The theological framework of the project involved three main aspects. First, the project used the body image …

August 28, 1963: Building Community Through Collective Discourse, Jennifer Nestelberger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The August 28, 1963 March on Washington is often remembered primarily for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which serves as the pinnacle of civil rights movement oratory. This thesis, in contrast, examines speeches of the leaders of the "Big Six" organizations that preceded King's well-known words in order to shed light on the complexities of the movement and the outcomes that can result from meaningful dissent. Occurring at a time of division, the March emerged as a symbol of hope for change in the nation. The addresses of the day reflected this hope and helped build …

A Change In Competition: Assessing The Nfa-Ld Community And Its Views On Topical Counterplans, Matthew Whitman

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Intercollegiate academic debate allows students to participate in various contests and competitions to demonstrate expertise in argumentation and public speaking (Freeley & Steinberg 2009). The National Forensic Association's Lincoln-Douglas (NFA-LD) debate is a two-person style of policy-based debate, and it borrows much of its argumentative structure from other team-based debate organizations (Freeley & Steinberg, 2009). Yet it also prohibits other theoretical arguments from being used through its codified rules. This project seeks to examine current NFA-LD community attitudes towards the prohibition of topical counterplans, a theoretical negative argument, in the event.

United States Sophistry On The Palestinian Resolution For Statehood, Marc James Mason

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project examines the rhetorical devices and practices used by the Obama Administration to express and construct opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s statehood bid. This study focuses on uncovering the ideology embedded within President Obama’s Speech to the United Nations General Assembly during the opening of the 66th Session. By conducting an ideology rhetorical analysis of this text, this examination will uncover the reasoning that Obama deploys to make sense of and define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more specifically, the Palestinian bid for statehood. This ideology has contributed to the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories; thereby, …

Woodrow Wilson: Examining The Scholarly Statesman Through A Rhetorical Lens, Candice Elaine Mae Radloff

Honors Capstone Projects - All

My Capstone Project is a rhetorical and descriptive analysis of President Woodrow Wilson’s most notable speeches from 1896 to 1917. As a scholar-president, I particularly focus on Wilson’s ability to translate his personal scholarship into effective rhetoric at different points in his career. I provide the historical background and context necessary to understand the relevance and impact of the selected speeches. The six speeches that I analyze reflect his scholarship and rhetorical genius in the political arena, covering the three pivotal phases of his profession life: university scholar and president, governor, and President of the United States. I also consider …

Kingdom Consequences: Socio-Political Dimensions Of Evangelistic Preaching, Kenneth Kinton

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study examines biblical, historical, and theoretcial trends in evangelistic preaching. This has been accomplished using biblical evidence, as well as insights from theologians and scholars within the realm of society, politics, and Christianity. The study provides a suggested methodology of sermon preparation for communicating to the modern Church.