How we communicate with each other matters greatly. Our identity, our friendships and marriages, our families, and our culture are the product of how we speak to one another. Our words affect our hopes and dreams, as well as those of our children. We insult, complain, or criticize. We compliment, offer support, and inspire. These are choices that take place in the crevices of our most private and public conversations with others. This book bridges communication theory and practice to foreground an important message: positive communication matters. By examining closely how people talk to each other at home or at work, this book enables undergraduate and graduate students to communicate more positively. The Art of Positive Communication is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in interpersonal communication courses and as a supplemental text to inspire all students to communicate better.

alieNATION presents research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication that explores a range of important topics and variables affecting voter attitudes and behavior in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. In exploring the messages, issues, and voters of the 2012 election, these studies employ multiple methods including experimental design, content analysis, rhetorical criticism, and survey research. Whereas other election research tends to investigate either the content or effects of campaign communication, the more comprehensive and systematic nature of this collection enables alieNATION to cohere thematically around considerations of voter alienation, political engagement, political efficacy, and ultimately, citizens' voting decisions.

World Wide Web is becoming an utility, not unlike electricity or running water in our homes. This creates new ways of using the web, where Social Media plays a particular role. This gives an unprecedented opportunity to study the emerging social phenomena in the virtual world. In addition, it opens new avenues for improving public services such as schooling and education. This book includes some of the latest developments in employing the information and communications technologies for examining both virtual and real-life social interactions. Investigating modern challenges such as online education, web security or organized cybercrime, this book outlines the state of the art in social applications and implications of ICT.

This volume draws on issues and cases from more than 20 countries to provide empirical evidence and theoretical insights into why discourse matters. Covering a wide range of concepts and topical issues, contributors from media studies, journalism, and linguistics address the following key questions: Why and how does discourse matter pertaining to identity in a mediatized world? Who makes discourse and identity matter, for what reason, in what way, and with what consequences? The volume provokes a new proposition that it is necessary to go beyond the safe havens of disciplinary strongholds with familiar terminology, methodology, and questions to address future inquiries into discourse and identity from a combination of linguistics and journalistic media studies.

With more than 65,000 copies sold in two editions and recommended by "Forbes "and "U.S. News & World Report, " this newly updated guide offers sound advice on every aspect of researching, writing, and delivering an effective speech. Filled with anecdotes, examples, and practical advice, this accessible guide makes one of the most daunting tasks manageable--and even fun.
Speaking coach Joan Detz covers everything from the basics to the finer points of writing and delivering a speech with persuasion, style, and humor.
Topics include:

• Assessing your audience
• Researching your subject--and deciding what to leave out
• Keeping it simple
• Using imagery, quotations, repetition, and humor
• Special-occasion speeches
• Speaking to international audiences
• Using Power Point and other visual aids
• And many more

Updated to include new examples and the latest technology, as well as a section on social media, this is a must-have for anyone who writes and delivers speeches, whether novices or experienced veterans at the podium.

Methods for studying writing processes have significantly developed over the last two decades. The rapid development of software tools which support the collection together with the display and analysis of writing process data and new input from various neighboring disciplines contribute to an increasingly detailed knowledge acquisition about the complex cognitive processes of writing. This volume, which focuses on research methods, mixed methods designs, conceptual considerations of writing process research, interdisciplinary research influences and the application of research methods in educational settings, provides an insight into the current status of the methodological development of writing process research in Europe.

The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries have involved much discussion on overhauling and refining a scholarly understanding of the verbal system for first-century Greek. These discussions have included advances in verbal aspect theory and other linguistic approaches to describing the grammatical phenomena of ancient languages. This volume seeks to apply some of that learning to the narrow realm of how prohibitions were constructed in the first-century Greek of the New Testament. Part 1 "The Great Prohibition Debate" seeks to demonstrate that verbal aspect theory has a better explanation than traditional Aktionsart theory for authorial choices between the negated present imperative and the negated aorist subjunctive in expressing prohibitions in the Greek New Testament. Part 2 "All the Prohibitions in the Greek NT" continues to examine prohibitions, but is more of an exercise in functional linguistics. That is, rather than apply verbal aspect theory to the grammar of prohibition constructions, Part 2 seeks only to survey the (initially surprising) wide variety of ways prohibitions can be expressed in koine Greek: more than a dozen different constructions. To do this, the NT prohibitions are grouped in their varying grammatical-syntactical and/or pragmatic constructions, all of which function - in varying degrees - in a prohibitory fashion. This taxonomy may prove to be the beginnings of further investigations into how biblical Greek communicates commands.

With drug information rapidly migrating to the Web, the chronically poor standards of drug information available to consumers in the developed and the developing world are being further compromised. This book offers insight into the uncharted waters of prescription drug information and promotion on the internet and suggests how it might be transformed into an unprecedented agent for good. It traces the social and political history of prescription drug information and marketing to Western consumers, offers a social and communicative profile of prescription drug Web sites, and evaluates the most widely used sources of prescription drug information, from government organizations and information companies and TV-related sites, to health service provider sites, manufacturers' brand sites, and social media, including YouTube and Wikipedia. The focus throughout is on practical outcomes: How can information for consumer decision making be optimized and how can consumers use it responsibly?

Neil Postman's most popular work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), provided an insightful critique of the effects of television on public discourse in America, arguing that television's bias towards entertaining content trivializes serious issues and undermines the basis of democratic culture. Lance Strate, who earned his doctorate under Neil Postman and is one of the leading media ecology scholars of our time, re-examines Postman's arguments, updating his analysis and critique for the twenty-first-century media environment that includes the expansion of television programming via cable and satellite as well as the Internet, the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Integrating Postman's arguments about television with his critique of technology in general, Strate considers the current state of journalism, politics, religion, and education in American culture. Strate also contextualizes Amusing Ourselves to Death through an examination of Postman's life and career and the field of media ecology that Postman introduced. This is a book about our prospects for the future, which can only be based on the ways in which we think and talk about the present.

Although community engagement to enhance justice, equity, and inclusion is at the heart of this book, dancing with difference is the overarching metaphor. It is used to explain diverse relations between contexts, institutions, structures, community organizations, and groups, and the diverse relationships between organizational representatives and community members. It is these dances with difference through which groups and individuals deal with contextual forces, negotiate cultural identities, subjectivities, and positioning, and orient themselves toward their work. Featuring case studies of several international, national, and local organizations, the book showcases both first-hand and public discourses related to community engagement work from Nepal and Northern Ireland to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the U.S. A framework of critical/interpretive intercultural praxis is offered to guide research and practice across the case studies. It is designed to benefit scholars, students, and practitioners who work in community-based settings by presenting a relevant and applicable guide for entering into community engagement.

Forensics, more commonly known as speech and debate, is one of the most rewarding and beneficial educational activities available to students. This textbooks is designed to introduce students to individual forensic events, giving suggestions and guidelines for their preparation. The text describes each event and the experience of competing. Students are shown how to select and perform winning materials, and how to achieve success. Chapters describe the structure and strategies of original oratory, extemporaneous speaking, humorous, dramatic, poetic, and duet interpretation, as well as prose interpretation, impromptu and expository speaking required by many national forensics contests. Also includes a chapter on competitive mock legislatures. For speech and debate contests, this book can help anyone become a winner! Seven chapters: Forensics Overview, Original Oratory, Extemporaneous Speaking, Oral Interpretation of Literature, Student Congress, Supplementary National Events. Privately Sponsored Speech Contests.

It has often proven difficult to classify certain words as adpositions or nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. This book looks at the distinctions between adpositions, i.e. prepositions and postpositions, and other word classes with respect to a wide range of languages. In particular, it focuses on how these distinctions have been treated by previous authors and the terminology used to describe items on or close to the adpositional border, e.g. pseudo-postpositions and auxiliary nouns. Chapters are devoted to adpositions as opposed to most of the other traditional parts of speech. Among the criteria for (non-)adpositional status brought up are the presence or absence of inflection on putative adpositions and genitive case marking on complements of such words. Definitive conclusions on how to determine whether words are adpositions seem elusive, but some formal criteria, such as absence of inflection, are problematic; possibly a solution will involve a notion of adpositional function.

Intertextuality in reading - namely the way in which written texts refer to other texts - has recently attracted attention in the field of linguistics and related disciplines. This book offers a unique look at the operation of intertextuality in real-world texts and the role of readers' cognitive processes in responding to intertextuality. The first part of the book presents innovative research into how intertextuality operates within a corpus of authentic texts. It then draws on that analysis to propose a comprehensive framework by means of which types of intertextual reference in texts can be classified and explained. The second part provides a rare example of an empirical research study into readers' cognitive processes as they encounter intertextuality.

Has the hype associated with the "revolutionary" potential of the World Wide Web and digital media for environmental activism been muted by the past two decades of lived experience? What are the empirical realities of the prevailing media landscape? Using a range of related disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this book analyze and explain the complicated relationship between environmental conflict and the media. They shine light on why media are central to historical and contemporary conceptions of power and politics in the context of local, national and global issues and outline the emerging mixture of innovation and reliance on established strategies in environmental campaigns. With cases drawn from different sections of the globe - Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Africa - the book demonstrates how conflicts emanate from and flow across multiple sites, regions and media platforms and examines the role of the media in helping to structure collective discussion, debate and decision-making.

International language tests increasingly use group oral formats in both high- and low-stakes contexts. But how do test-takers with different characteristics interact in such formats? This book explores how test-takers with different extraversion and proficiency levels co-construct spoken interaction in groups. The impact of the two test-taker characteristics was examined across three task types and with two group sizes. Examination of group performances using both statistical and Conversation Analysis tools offered insights into how group conversation is co-constructed. By enhancing our understanding of the group oral test construct, the findings have useful implications for international language test development and enable appropriate choices regarding task type and group size.

Now in its third edition, Communication: Motivation, Knowledge, Skills (previously Human Communication: Motivation, Knowledge, and Skills) is a textbook for the basic (hybrid) communication course at 2- and 4-year colleges and universities. Beginning with the premise that all forms of communication can be important, this text helps students develop a framework for choosing communication messages and behaviors that will allow them to communicate competently in any situation. Through a theoretically-based and skills-oriented approach, the text emphasizes the basic themes of motivation, knowledge, and skills across the contexts of interpersonal communication, small group communication, public speaking, and computer-mediated communication and mass communication. Building on the success of the first two editions, this third edition is unique in that it: - Features the collaborative work of three recognized experts in the communication discipline, each of whom is a specialist in one of the three areas covered in the hybrid iteration of the basic communication course: Interpersonal communication, Brian H. Spitzberg; Small group communication, J. Kevin Barge; Public speaking, Sherwyn P. Morreale. - Offers a unified approach to the basic processes of human communication based on a communication competence model pioneered by Brian H. Spitzberg. - Includes extensive coverage of mediated competence and mass communication. In addition to theoretically based but accessible content, all chapters have features designed to enhance teaching and learning. These include the story of a student experience that opens each chapter and is discussed and used to illustrate the chapter's content; tables and boxes related to important topics presented to intrigue student readers and "lock in learning"; self-assessment tools students can use to evaluate their own motivation, knowledge, and skills related to real-world situations; and knowledge-building discussion questions and competence activities for home assignments or in-class groups at the conclusion of each chapter. A new Test Bank to accompany the third edition is available to instructors as a free PDF. Please email [email protected] to obtain a copy of this highly valid and reliable assessment resource. In addition, the lead author, Sherwyn Morreale, is happy to participate in a Q&A session with students via a video call every semester that the book is used. To arrange this, please email the author directly at [email protected]

This book is an attempt to reconstruct, in the context of Polish and European history and culture, the picture of Europe and European integration present in Poles' minds. The reconstruction is based on semantic analyses of linguistic data in the context of Polish and European cultures. Until 2004, the political discourse on Poland's foreign policy had been focused on the issue of Poland joining the European Union. The accession of Poland to the EU became the reason behind forming public opinions on Europe in general, its history, place in the world and its relations with other continents or civilizations, as well as on the place of Poland in the European civilization and in the European Union. In the discourses, there are two profiles of Europe in the context of integration: Europe as a stronghold and Europe as a community. This is the method which gave rise to the profiles of Europe which are represented by two socially entrenched points of view: a realist (pragmatist) perceives Europe as a stronghold and an idealist (visionary) - as a community.

This is an up-to-date and easy-to-use phrasebook that will have you communicating in Zulu in no time! Arranged by subject, it supplies a range of questions you may want to ask in Zulu, and the answers you may be given, for most occasions - from exchanging greetings to buying arts and crafts, asking directions, ordering food and talking about the weather. This is an excellent resource for visitors to South Africa as well as non-Zulu-speaking South Africans.

The netted human we may call Homo Irretitus resides in a space made possible by technologies frequently referred to as new media, social media, emerging media, and Web 2.0. Traditional conceptualizations of audiences and producers are shifting so the very making of our social practices, spaces, and contexts in this brave new world of the World Wide Web, the work of Homo Irretitus in this intersectional space, must be interrogated. If we are to understand this space, we should approach it from varied vantage points. This book gathers scholars from both within and external to the core of new media studies, each of whom applies a unique theoretical perspective to the intersection of audience and production in the space enabled by emerging communications technologies. In doing so they help shed light on a variety of the tensions evident in the new digital spaces in which we create and recreate (and often produse) so much of our lives, our identities, and our selves. Focusing multiple spotlights on the intersection of audiences and production made possible by social software helps make clearer a more nuanced perspective than would otherwise be possible as well as opening up questions for further debate within the field.

Theorizing Ambivalence in Ang Lee's Transnational Cinema takes a unique approach to the study of transnational cinema by examining the representation of Chinese identity in Ang Lee's films and the public discourse from various audience communities. This book focuses on his transnational films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Lust, Caution (2007) as two case studies. Providing a systematic analysis of audience discourse from Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, this study challenges ideological constructions of racial and ethnic identity, such as Chineseness, that are objectively defined within a static nation-state mechanism in an era of globalization. Through the study of the representation of Chineseness, this book expands the theoretical discussions on the politics of national identity and cultural syncretism represented in transnational cinema and further provides a good example of the familiar cycle of ambivalent emotion toward the West in the aftermath of postcolonialism. China and Taiwan's long history of engaging in a subordinate relationship with the West enhances the resurgence of ambivalence. The representations become a significant and predominant way to mediate one's bodily experiences, to connect and collaborate with one another, and to form and inform one's cultural identity. The analyses of these films and the audience discourse are essential to an understanding of the ways in which new media technologies impact and alter the human interactions between peoples from various cultural, social, and political contexts.

As video games have become an important economic and cultural force, scholars are increasingly trying to better understand the ways that engagement with games may drive learning, literacy, and social participation in the twenty-first century. In this book, the authors consider games and just as importantly, the social interactions around games, not in terms of how they should be managed or incorporated into existing educational structures, but for what they tell us about the forms of learning and literacy that are already instantiated within the use of these media. To this end, this book delves deeply into James Paul Gee's (2004) productive and influential concept of the affinity space - the physical or virtual locations (or some combination of the two) where people come together around a shared interest or "affinity." By explicating how and why engaged fans of digital media do what they do in online spaces, the authors cast a light, as Gee did, on the promise of these media and the problems facing current educational systems.

For more than a decade, girl power has been a cultural barometer, reflecting girlhood's ever-changing meanings. How did girl power evolve from a subcultural rallying cry to a mainstream catchphrase, and what meaning did young girls find in its pop culture forms? From the riot grrrls to the Spice Girls to The Powerpuff Girls, and influenced by books like Reviving Ophelia and movements like Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Growing Up With Girl Power charts this history. It considers how real girls who grew up with girl power interpreted its messages about empowerment, girlhood, strength, femininity, race, and more, and suggests that for young girls, commercialized girl power had real strengths and limitations - sometimes in fascinating, unexpected ways. Encompassing issues of pre-adolescent body image, gender identity, sexism, and racism, Growing Up With Girl Power underscores the importance of talking with young girls, and is a compelling addition to the literature on girls, media, and culture. Supplemental resources are available online at GrowingUpWithGirlPower.com.

News Literacy gathers leading scholars, educators, and media makers to explore new approaches to thinking about, examining, and evaluating news media and civic engagement around these fundamental questions: What are the most pressing issues in news, media, and culture in a converged, digital, and global media age? What are the best educational practices to foster media literate understanding, engagement, and expression across borders, across cultures, and across divides? The book will prepare future media practitioners (and citizens) to embrace new media environments that can simultaneously empower their craft and their civic voice. This means teaching not only about the various ways new technologies are used and to what end, but also how these tools can enable better engagement with audiences, more dialog with communities, and a more nuanced understanding of how information is processed through new media platforms. Such an approach can empower a more active, collaborative, and empowered information landscape for the digital age.