According to most studies, public speaking is the number one fear among professionals. Most suffer from stage fright, lack of basic vocal training and/or lack of delivery technique. Such individuals seek tips and tricks in books, articles, and blogs, and assume that there's a fast and easy way for appearing eloquent and polished in front of an audience. However, these sources often fail to address the underlying issue of stage fright, and the same habitual responses to nervousness continue to plague the speaker. Grace Under Pressure solves this issue by unveiling three areas of training that great speakers use to develop their skills. In the first section, author Lisa Wentz shares techniques that she has developed to help anyone overcome inner obstacles so they can focus on developing their outward presence. The second section outlines how to best develop the physical aspects of speech, including posture, breathing, resonance, and articulation. And the third section centres on delivery: how to use pauses, word stress, and storytelling, among other techniques, to improve your performance from novice to master. This final section offers acting techniques and directorial advice that can be applied to speeches, pitches, presentations and meeting strategies.

...and death came third! The definitive guide to networking and speaking in public. Do you dread going to networking events? Do you hide at the back of the room when you have the opportunity to present your business? In 1984 a New York Times Survey on Social Anxiety placed death third in the list of people's biggest fears. The top two responses were walking into a room full of strangers and speaking in public. Facing these two fears head on, '...and death came third!' rocketed straight to Number Two on the Amazon UK bestseller lists on publication of its First Edition in 2006. Since then thousands of people have turned to its pages to help them network and present with much more confidence. In this updated second edition you can discover how to: Walk into a networking event and approach people with CONFIDENCE, STRUCTURE a talk so that you can get your key message across POWERFULLY, ENGAGE people in conversation and get them interested in YOU, FOCUS on the results you want from networking and achieve them EASILY, STAND and speak with CONVICTION and AUTHORITY and much, much more. Brought to you by Andy Lopata, Business Networking Strategist and Peter Roper, The Natural Presenter.

In the 1969 issue of Negro Digest, a young Black Arts Movement poet then-named Ameer (Amiri) Baraka published "We Are Our Feeling: The Black Aesthetic." Baraka's emphasis on the importance of feelings in black selfhood expressed a touchstone for how the black liberation movement grappled with emotions in response to the politics and racial violence of the era. In her latest book, award-winning author Lisa M. Corrigan suggests that Black Power provided a significant repository for negative feelings, largely black pessimism, to resist the constant physical violence against black activists and the psychological strain of political disappointment. Corrigan asserts the emergence of Black Power as a discourse of black emotional invention in opposition to Kennedy-era white hope. As integration became the prevailing discourse of racial liberalism shaping mid-century discursive structures, so too, did racial feelings mold the biopolitical order of postmodern life in America. By examining the discourses produced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and other Black Power icons who were marshaling black feelings in the service of black political action, Corrigan traces how black liberation activists mobilized new emotional repertoires.

While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation. Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community. Grounded in Ida B. Wells's summation of lynching as a social contract among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore's book speaks to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its expressions as part and parcel of America's rhetorical tradition and political legacy. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the formation of America's national identity and with the nation's need to continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary, recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.

The voice of reason in a world that won’t shut up.

The Sunday Times Bestseller

Every day, James O’Brien listens to people blaming hard-working immigrants for stealing their jobs while scrounging benefits, and pointing their fingers at the EU and feminists for destroying Britain. But what makes James’s daily LBC show such essential listening – and has made James a standout social media star – is the incisive way he punctures their assumptions and dismantles their arguments live on air, every single morning.

In the bestselling How To Be Right, James provides a hilarious and invigorating guide to talking to people with unchallenged opinions. With chapters on every lightning-rod issue, James shows how people have been fooled into thinking the way they do, and in each case outlines the key questions to ask to reveal fallacies, inconsistencies and double standards.

If you ever get cornered by ardent Brexiteers, Daily Mail disciples or corporate cronies, this book is your conversation survival guide.

Public speaking is one of the most common fears. Few people look forward to talking in front of others and even fewer do it as effectively as they could. A career in psychology and its related fields involves extensive public speaking, so you will need to learn to do it well. With time and practice, you too can become a confident and effective presenter. ""Public Speaking for Psychologists"" is a practical and lighthearted guide to planning, designing, and delivering a presentation. The first half of the book covers the nuts-and-bolts of public speaking: preparing a talk, submitting an abstract, developing your slides, managing anxiety, handling questions, and preventing public-speaking disasters. The second half applies these tips to common presentations, such as research talks, poster presentations, job talks, and talks to lay audiences. Throughout the book, the authors - both experienced presenters - offer realistic advice, useful tips, and humorous stories of embarrassing mistakes they'll never make again.

Essays that show what a broad conception of rhetoric means and does in relation to practice Rhetoric is the art of emphasis, in the ancient sense of bringing to light or obscuring in shadow, and it is both a practice and a theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a "practical art." The Practice of Rhetoric: Poetics, Performance, Philosophy presents just such an account of rhetoric that presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The essays gathered in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric's educational mission and its investments in both theory and practice. The book extends that vision through the prisms of poetics, performance, and philosophy of argument. Poetics shows rhetoric's meaning making in all its verbal possibilities and material manifestations, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the twentieth century. Performance puts what is created into the heat of public life, tapping out the rhythms of Byzantine prose or using collage to visually depict the beliefs and convictions of Martin Luther King Jr. Philosophy of argument enacts the mutually constitutive relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, offering new insights on and contexts for old tools like stasis and disputation, while keeping the focus on usefulness and teachability. Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the cooperation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. This volume will rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission.

A study that challenges our notions about citizenship and judgment by considering the place of children in historical and contemporary legal discourse. Many of the most controversial political issues of our time focus on the actions and well-being of children such as Greta Thunberg's climate movement; youth activists standing up for racial justice, safe schools, and an equitable economy; and the furor over separating migrant children from their families. When do we treat children as competent citizens, when do we treat them as dependents in need of protection, and why? The Child before the Court: Judgment, Citizenship, and the Constitution provides answers to these foundational questions. It analyzes landmark US Supreme Court cases involving children's free speech and due process rights and argues that our ideas about civic and legal judgment are deeply contested concepts instead of simple character traits. These cases serve as analytic touchstones for these problems, and the Court's opinions seemingly articulate clear rules through a pragmatic balancing of interests. Timothy Barouch shows how these cases continually reshape constitutional thought, breaking from a vocabulary of wardship and recasting the child as a liberal individual. He analyzes these legal opinions as judicial novelizations and focuses on their rhetorical markers: the range of tropes, idioms, figures, and arguments that emerge across nearly two centuries of jurisprudence in this important but oft-neglected area. The careful and subtle readings of these cases demonstrate how judicial representations of the child provide key resources for thinking about the child as citizen and, more broadly, citizenship itself. It serves as a bold call to think through the relationship between the liberal individual and the problem of civic judgment as it manifests in public culture in a wide array of contexts at a time when liberal democracy is under siege.

'Most books on persuasion teach the few how to sway the many. With wit and vim, Guy has given us something else: an X-ray into the tactics of those trying to change our minds and behaviour.' - Stephen Krupin, former speechwriter for Barack Obama When Winston Churchill spoke in Parliament, he convinced an empire to go to war. When Martin Luther King spoke in Washington, he convinced millions to open their hearts to change. When Oprah Winfrey said: 'Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do,' she also used rhetoric. As we have here, by deploying the rule of three to stress a point. Rhetoric - the art of persuasive speaking and writing - often gets a bad rap. In this dazzling, fast-paced guide, speechwriter Guy Doza rescues rhetoric from the shadows and showcases its immense power to change lives, for good and bad. Highlighting punchy sayings from Ancient Rome to modern marketing, he shows how leaders, businesses and even our own friends use rhetorical techniques every day to make convincing arguments. What's more, this guide to rhetoric will show you how to learn to use this persuasive language in your own life: How to convince an investor to back your venture What to say to a potential lover in a bar And, the six rules of apology you should use if you ever accidentally run over the next-door neighbour's cat... How to Apologise for Killing a Cat is a quick read, humorous and highly practicable. It decodes the tricks and techniques of rhetoric for everyday readers. It's the only book you need to make a convincing marketing pitch. It's the only book you need to give a rousing speech. It's the only book you need to write persuasively. It's the best book to explain the technique we've just used here. After reading this book, you will start to see the trick of rhetoric used everywhere. After reading this book, you will never see the world the same way again! Extract Have you ever had that unpleasant anxiety of taking your car to the mechanic and feeling like you're being swindled? Most of you will probably know exactly what I am talking about. We don't know how cars work, we don't know what the parts are called and we don't know how to fix them ourselves. This lack of knowledge makes us vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation, and we know it. So does the mechanic. Now, most mechanics are honest individuals, not rogues, but can we say the same of people who run countries and big companies? When it comes to ordinary life away from the car engine or central heating boiler, most of us don't even realise just how vulnerable we are. People can use persuasive language to swindle us, cheat us, and exploit us to the hilt. And the worst part is that we are not even aware that it is happening. Welcome to rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Rhetoric is a superpower. It can alter the way we think, the way we behave and sometimes even the way we live our lives. And its most explosive charge lies in its subtlety. We need to be aware of how such persuasive language is used, not only so that we can be more persuasive ourselves, but defend ourselves against the rhetorical advances of those who would seek to exploit us. For too long, rhetoric has been a dark and ancient art confined to the secretive circles of politics and academia. This mystery and misunderstanding has often led to the public to consider it to be the tool of crooks, spin doctors and villains. But no more! The time has come to bring rhetoric out of the darkness and show it for what it is: a mighty linguistic tool. Whether it is a conversation between friends in a cafe, a pathetic attempt to flirt at a bar, or a meaningful conversation with a world renowned philosopher, rhetoric is everywhere.

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations.Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book's three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as textfosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

Broad generalizations about "people today" are a familiar feature of first-year student writing. How Students Write brings a fresh perspective to this perennial observation, using corpus linguistics techniques. This study analyzes sentence-level patterns in student writing to develop an understanding of how students present evidence, draw connections between ideas, relate to their readers, and, ultimately, learn to construct knowledge in their writing. Drawing on both first-year and upper-level student writing, the book examines the discourse of students at different points in their education. It also distinguishes between argumentative and analytic essays to explore the way school genres and assignments shape students' choices. In focusing on sentence-level features such as hedges ("perhaps") and boosters ("definitely"), this study shows how such rhetorical choices work together to open or close opportunities for thoughtful exchanges of ideas. Attention to these features can help instructors foster civil discourse, design effective assignments, and expose and question norms of higher education.