Advanced Public Speaking: Theory and Techniques Based on the Rhetorical Canons provides students with classical and contemporary theory, detailed guidance and techniques, and explorations of various aspects of argumentation related to the development and delivery of a variety of speeches. The book leads students through the five rhetorical canons-invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery-offering them a conceptual overview, followed by an operational framework, and ending with cautions on what to avoid in order to become stronger speakers. This structure provides students with a highly practical model they can use when constructing their own speeches. The text presents a myriad of rhetorical strategies, stylistic devices, and practical examples for students to draw upon, including vital insights for crafting informative, persuasive, argumentative, and storytelling speeches, as well as effective visual presentations. Two appendices feature outline templates for the various ways to organize a speech and a visual depiction of hand gestures to aid students in their delivery and performance. Advanced Public Speaking equips students with the information they need to develop into confident and capable public speakers. The book is an exemplary guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses in public speaking.

Women's persuasion and performance in the Age of EnlightenmentOver a century before first-wave feminism, British women's Enlightenment rhetoric prefigured nineteenth-century feminist arguments for gender equality, women's civil rights, professional opportunities, and standardized education. Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women's rhetoric. This recovery of British women's performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric. Davis broadens women's Enlightenment rhetorics to include highly public venues such as theaters, clubs, salons, and debating societies, as well as the mediated sites of the periodical essay, the treatise on rhetorical theory, and women's written proposals, plans, defenses and arguments for education. Through these sites, women's rhetorical postures diverged from patriarchal prescriptions rather to deliver protofeminist persuasive performances of wit, virtue, and emotion. Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women's rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women's rhetorical practice-the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.

Southern rhetoric is communication's oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what would southern rhetorical critique be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came? Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott.

Featuring a balance of practical advice and sound instruction, Speechwriting: A Rhetorical Guide provides readers with essential knowledge to prepare and deliver well-constructed and well-researched speeches appropriate for a variety of contexts. The first part of the book discusses traditional rhetorical theory in a way that is direct and easy for students to understand. The chapters cover such topics as audience and the rhetorical canons of invention, elocution or style, disposition or organization, delivery, and memory. Chapters in the second part then apply the rhetorical principles to four different types of speeches: inaugural addresses, commencement addresses, a variety of persuasive speeches, and a number of ceremonial ones. The text includes excerpts from actual speeches, illustrative speechwriting samples with commentary from a prospective speech writer, and a set of exercises that encourage readers to think about how the sample speech might be improved upon or modified if they were the one writing it. Speechwriting connects rhetorical theory to modern situations and settings to emphasize real-world application. The text is an exemplary resource for courses in speech and writing as found in departments of communication studies, English and composition, political science, education, and any other discipline in which people are frequently asked to speak or address an audience.