The ability to connect with an audience is an essential element of public speaking. While an effective presentation can have all the elements of good pace, pitch and body language, it can still leave an audience unaffected or unmoved. Rob Parson believes even the most proficient speakers can enhance their public speaking by focusing on the heart of communication: connection. For the first time, Rob Parsons shares his insights from over fifty years of experience. He unpacks methods that will help any public speaker - from how to prepare well and utilise the power of story, to giving top tips on avoiding common distractions. Readers will come away with a better grasp on public speaking - not only how to speak to the head, but to the heart. Having spoken to over a million people around the world, from multinational organisations to church congregations, Rob has fine-tuned approaches that can help anyone wanting to grow in this area.

The Complete Business Speaker: How to Prepare and Deliver Effective Business Presentations equips students with the knowledge, skills, and mindset needed to successfully speak on behalf of an enterprise. The text focuses on the real-world challenges associated with business speaking and effectively prepares readers to deliver speeches and presentations with savvy and confidence. Readers learn the importance of tailoring a speech to key audiences, as well as a company's unique goals and policies. The text underscores how prepared remarks must be well-researched and effective to make an impact on potential legislation, local regulation, community relations, and business operations. Students learn effective strategies for speech delivery, listening, and interacting with audiences. Specific topics include best practices for delivering bad news, how to handle hostile audiences, addressing small groups, and whether or not the use of PowerPoint slides will enhance a presentation. Throughout, real-life accounts from a variety of business speakers illuminate the successes and learning opportunities experienced by business professionals. Providing students with a highly practical and focused perspective, The Complete Business Speaker is well suited for courses in business communication and public speaking.

Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association.Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for Audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the "bad sixties." These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. These warped messages contribute to "selective amnesia," a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.