Write and present a memorable wedding toast with this light-hearted, humorous guide that gives you all the tools you'll need for a successful speech-the perfect gift for any best man or maid of honor. As much as it's an honor to be chosen as the best man or maid of honor at a wedding, giving the perfect speech can sometimes be nerve-wracking. Delivering a crowd-pleasing toast at the reception that has the right amount of humor and sentimentality is a daunting undertaking, no matter how advanced your public speaking skills are. Pete Honsberger's guide to giving the perfect wedding toast provides even the most nervous of public speakers with all the tools and advice they need for writing and presenting the best toast ever. After witnessing speeches both good and bad, Honsberger shares a few bits of wisdom he's learned along the way, providing building blocks to creating an unforgettable story along with helpful speech prompts, and the perfect checklist that will turn a potentially scary obligation into a golden opportunity. Wedding Toasts 101 presents a fun and simple way to write a successful wedding toast without all the stress so you can spend less time worrying and more time celebrating the happy couple.

In this hilarious and highly practical book, author and professional speaker Scott Berkun reveals the techniques behind what great communicators do, and shows how anyone can learn to use them well. For managers and teachers -- and anyone else who talks and expects someone to listen -- "Confessions of a Public Speaker" provides an insider's perspective on how to effectively present ideas to anyone. It's a unique, entertaining, and instructional romp through the embarrassments and triumphs Scott has experienced over 15 years of speaking to crowds of all sizes.

With lively lessons and surprising confessions, you'll get new insights into the art of persuasion -- as well as teaching, learning, and performance -- directly from a master of the trade.

Highlights include: Berkun's hard-won and simple philosophy, culled from years of lectures, teaching courses, and hours of appearances on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC Practical advice, including how to work a tough room, the science of not boring people, how to survive the attack of the butterflies, and what to do when things go wrong The inside scoop on who earns $30,000 for a one-hour lecture and why The worst -- and funniest -- disaster stories you've ever heard (plus countermoves you can use)

Filled with humorous and illuminating stories of thrilling performances and real-life disasters, "Confessions of a Public Speaker" is inspirational, devastatingly honest, and a blast to read.

This book brings together friends and colleagues of Prof. Dr. Ayseli Usluata who cherish her as a person as well as an academic. As we have all experienced, Prof. Usluata's major passion is advancing academia as an interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, this book's aim is to bring together current original works in communication studies and business communication fields. This volume is intended to provide an intellectual, multi-faceted and balanced collection of writings from various academic fields with a communication focus. Academic articles in this book range from branding cases to advertising studies and to media education.

Public deliberation depends on how skillful communicators are in establishing their version of what is known to be publicly acceptable. This volume provides rhetorical analyses of institutional websites, political speeches, scientific presentations, journalistic accounts or visual entertainment. It shows the significance of rhetorical construction of knowledge in the public sphere. It addresses the issues of citizenship and social participation, media agendas, surveillance and verbal or visual manipulation. It offers rhetorical critiques of current trends in specialist communication and of devices used when contested interests or ideologies are presented.

Social Media in the Classroom provides a comprehensive resource for teaching social media in advertising, public relations, and journalism at the undergraduate and graduate levels. With twelve chapters by contributors from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, this volume provides original scholarly work which encompasses a wide range of methodologies, theories, and sample assignments for implementing social media. This book is an excellent resource for preparing students to transform their personal skills in social media into professional skills for success in the job market.

Social Media in the Classroom provides a comprehensive resource for teaching social media in advertising, public relations, and journalism at the undergraduate and graduate levels. With twelve chapters by contributors from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, this volume provides original scholarly work which encompasses a wide range of methodologies, theories, and sample assignments for implementing social media. This book is an excellent resource for preparing students to transform their personal skills in social media into professional skills for success in the job market.

As corporations ramp up "workforce globalization" and young professionals increasingly pursue opportunities to work abroad, social entrepreneurs use online digital platforms to create offline social events where foreigners can meet face-to-face. Through ethnographic study of such groups in Paris, Singapore, and Bangalore, Erika Polson illustrates how, as a new generation of expatriates uses location technologies to create mobile "places," a new global middle class is emerging. While there are many differences in the specifics between the expat groups, they share certain characteristics that indicate a larger logic to the way that the increasing mobility of professional career paths is connected to new subjectivities and changing forms of community among a diverse and growing demographic. This book opens up a new field of study, one which pays more attention to middle class mobility while questioning the privileging of mobility more generally.

Providing a comparative study on celebrity advocacy - from the work of Bono, George Clooney, Madonna, Greg Mortenson, and Kim Kardashian West - this book provides scholars and readers with a better understanding of some of the short-term and long-term impacts of various forms of celebrity activism. Each chapter illustrates how the impoverished rhetoric of celebrities often privileges the voices of those in the Global North over the efforts of local NGOs who have been working for years at addressing the same humanitarian crises. Whether we are talking about the building of schools for young women in Afghanistan or the satellite surveillance of potential genocidal acts carried out in the Sudan, various forms of celebrity advocacy resonate with scholars and members of the public who want to be seen "doing something." The author argues that more often than not, celebrity advocacy enhances a celebrity's reputation - but hinders the efforts of those who ask us to pay attention to the historical, structural, and material causes of these humanitarian crises.

The author analyses computer chat as a form of communication. While some forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) deviate only marginally from traditional writing, computer chat is popularly considered to be written conversation and the most "oral" form of written CMC. This book systematically explores the varying degrees of conversationality ("orality") in CMC, focusing in particular on a corpus of computer chat (synchronous and supersynchronous CMC) compiled by the author. The author employs Douglas Biber's multidimensional methodology and situates the chats relative to a range of spoken and written genres on his dimensions of linguistic variation. The study fills a gap both in CMC linguistics as regards a systematic variationist approach to computer chat genres and in variationist linguistics as regards a description of conversational writing.

The Revelations of Asher: Toward Supreme Love in Self is an endarkened, feminist, new literacies event. It critically and creatively explores Black women's terror in love. With poetry, prose, and analytic memos, Jeanine Staples shows how a group of Black women's talk and writings about relationships revealed epistemological and ontological revelations, after 9/11. These revelations are presented in the context of a third wave new literacies framework. They are voiced and storied dynamically by the women's seven fragmented selves. Through the selves, we learn the five ways the women lived as lovers: Main Chick, Side Chick, Bonnie, Bitch, and Victim. As an alternative-response to these identities in love, the author presents a new way. She introduces the Supreme Lover Identity and illuminates its integral connection to social and emotional justice for and through Black women's wisdom.

This volume brings together a number of corpus-based studies dealing with language varieties. These contributions focus on contemporary lines of research interests, and include language teaching and learning, translation, domain-specific grammatical and textual phenomena, linguistic variation and gender, among others. Corpora used in these studies range from highly specialized texts, including earlier scientific texts, to regional varieties. Under the umbrella of corpus linguistics, scholars also apply other distinct methodological approaches to their data in order to offer new insights into old and new topics in linguistics and applied linguistics. Another important contribution of this book lies in the obvious didactic implications of the results obtained in the individual chapters for domain-based language teaching.

Does traditional argument still have a place in the composition classroom? How can the process of argument be used productively by students? In this edited volume, some of the leading composition scholars today consider the ways in which argumentation as an approach to teaching writing remains valuable, in spite of the postmodern theories of composition that have challenged its relevance. First, the contributors "revisit" and explain the traditional approaches to argument--enthymeme, evidence, Toulmian, Rogerian, and classical rhetoric--and show why they are more relevant today than ever. They then "redefine" argument by connecting it with theoretical movements that have been adverse to it--feminism, narratology, and reflexive reading. As a result, the book unites apparently conflicting approaches into a new definition of argument that emphasizes inquiry over discord and understanding over entrenched difference. Argument Revisited, Argument Redefined enables compositions scholars and teachers to incorporate argumentative inquiry more effectively into the classroom, and demonstrates that argument as a genre and as a process can still serve students well. This unparalleled volume will be of use to professors and researchers in written communication, rhetoric, linguistics and communication.

Teach yourself Italian in just 12 weeks with this fun-filled language course. DK's 15 Minute Language is the perfect course for busy people who want to learn Italia fast. The 12 themed chapters are broken down into easy-to-follow 15-minute daily lessons, spanning a range of practical themes, including: leisure, business, food and drink, travel, and shopping. Each lesson combines vocabulary and grammar essentials with attractive full-colour images, making it quick, easy, and fun to learn new Italian vocabulary. There is no writing or homework - you simply use the cover flaps to hide the answers to exercises and test yourself as you learn. Each chapter ends with a review module, so you can track your progress and identify areas where you need further practice. Fancy becoming a pro at the language? Then get stuck in to discover: - Annotated photographic scenes and word lists make it easy to learn and remember new vocabulary. - 12 fun chapters, each designed to take a week to master, providing an easy-to-follow structure for new learners. - Easy-to-use pronunciation guide for every word, plus a dictionary and menu guide at the back of the book. - Regular review modules to help you track progress and assess how well you have learned the vocabulary in each chapter The course includes a free audio app that enables you to hear Italian words and phrases spoken by native speakers. Use the app alongside the book's easy-to-use pronunciation guides to perfect your pronunciation and practise Italian conversation in real-life situations. Whether you're a complete beginner or just in need of a refresher course, there's no easier way to learn Italian than with 15 Minute Italian Language. At DK, we believe in the power of discovery. So why stop there? Learn more languages with DK's 15 minute guides to French, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and more!

While multimodality is one of the most influential semiotic theories for analysing media artefacts, the concepts of this theory are heterogeneous and widespread. The book takes the differences between approaches in Germany and those in international contexts as a starting point, offering new insights into the analysis of multimodal documents. It features contributions by researchers from more than 15 nations and various disciplines, including theoretical reflections on multimodality, thoughts about methodological, empirical, and experimental approaches as well as analyses of various multimodal artefacts.

This book discusses the nature of optionality in second language grammars and the indeterminacy observed in second language users' linguistic representations. For these purposes, experimental data from 213 learners of German and 150 learners of Russian have been collected and analysed with a special focus on the acquisition of various "subjectless" and impersonal constructions as well as argument licensing. Whereas voice alternations and argument licensing are topics amply discussed in theoretical domains, their practical implementation within second language research has remained a research lacuna. This piece of work intends to fill the gap.

From the Foreword by Renee Fleming: "Kathryn LaBouff has developed an approach to singing in the English language which is wonderfully user-friendly, and which has surely saved much wear and tear on my voice. It is a technique that has empowered me with the knowledge and skills to bring a text to life and to be able to negotiate all of the sounds of the language with the least amount of effort. I have found her clever and extremely creative use of substitute consonants or combinations of consonants in creating clear diction utterly delightful because they are surprising and because they work. These techniques have been equally useful when singing in foreign languages. We sopranos are not usually known to have good diction, particularly in our high range. I found that working with Kathryn improved my ability to be understood by an enormous percentile of the audience with much less vocal fatigue than I would have experienced if left to my own devices. I have often told my colleagues enthusiastically of her interesting solutions to the frustrating problems of diction. I am thrilled that her techniques are now in print for all to benefit from them."
In Singing and Communicating in English, internationally renowned diction coach Kathryn LaBouff provides singers with an accessible guide to the principles of English diction they need to communicate the text successfully. Her thorough and much sought-after technique clarifies the physiology of speech, emphasizes the studied practice of careful and articulate pronunciation, and focuses on the study of English cadence. Covering aspects of phonetics from vowels to diphthongs to fricatives, the book includes multiple practical exercises inInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, helpful diagrams, and pronunciation drills, each chosen from the most essential English art song and operatic repertoire. In addition to standard American and British English, a variety of regional dialects and accents are covered in depth. A companion website features a full range of vowel/consonant drills, poems read aloud by the author and by theater and voiceover actor John Keating, as well as an exercise answer key, and publishers' lists to help the singer locate a vast array of English language works for performance.
This book is an invaluable resource for all vocalists (both professional and aspiring), diction instructors, teachers, and coaches, and choral directors. VISIT THE COMPANION SITE AT www.oup.com/us/singinginenglish

Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities examines what takes place in writing classrooms beyond academic analytical and argumentative writing to include forms that engage students in navigating the civic, political, social and cultural spheres they inhabit. It presents a conceptual framework for imagining how writing instructors can institute campus-wide initiatives, such as Writing Across Communities, that attempt to connect the classroom and the campus to the students' various communities of belonging, especially students who have been historically underserved. This framework reflects an emerging perspective-writing across difference-that challenges the argument that the best writing instructors can do is develop the skills and knowledge students need to make a successful transition from their home discourses to academic discourses. Instead, the value inherent in the full repertoire of linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources students use in their varied communities of belonging needs to be acknowledged and students need to be encouraged to call on these to the fullest extent possible in the course of learning what they are being taught in the writing classroom. Pedagogically, this book provides educators with the rhetorical, discursive and literacy tools needed to implement this approach.

Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities examines what takes place in writing classrooms beyond academic analytical and argumentative writing to include forms that engage students in navigating the civic, political, social and cultural spheres they inhabit. It presents a conceptual framework for imagining how writing instructors can institute campus-wide initiatives, such as Writing Across Communities, that attempt to connect the classroom and the campus to the students' various communities of belonging, especially students who have been historically underserved. This framework reflects an emerging perspective-writing across difference-that challenges the argument that the best writing instructors can do is develop the skills and knowledge students need to make a successful transition from their home discourses to academic discourses. Instead, the value inherent in the full repertoire of linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources students use in their varied communities of belonging needs to be acknowledged and students need to be encouraged to call on these to the fullest extent possible in the course of learning what they are being taught in the writing classroom. Pedagogically, this book provides educators with the rhetorical, discursive and literacy tools needed to implement this approach.

'Touching, tender . . . filled with wonderful humour' Sarah Haywood 'A very special book' Katie Fforde The Sunday Times bestselling novel, perfect for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and The Rosie Project. My name is Hope Nicely. Why am I writing this book? That's easy. This book is going to change my life. My boss, Karen, says a friend is a stranger you haven't met yet. I think that's right. Veronica Ptitsky and Danny Flynn are strangers, except I have met them now because they're in my writing class. Karen says friends always have your back. They don't mean your real back, of course. It's called an analogy. But I don't want any friends, actually (only dog ones). I have my mum, Jenny Nicely, who says adopting me was the best thing she ever did, even if my thoughts bounce a bit differently to other people's thoughts. She is proud of me for writing my book which will be a Big Achievement. I tell her that writing my story is going to change my life. Except when my life does change it isn't because of my writing but because something happens to my mum, Jenny Nicely, and she isn't here anymore. And, flip a pancake, this is not what I wanted. I'm not very good at being on my own and I wish she were here to tell me everything will be right as rain again soon. Maybe I do need some human friends after all . . . 'A gorgeous, funny, heartwarming read. Leaves you smiling' Ericka Walker, author of Dog Days

The volume takes a close look at discourse perspectives on academic genres. In the context of scientific communication and the evolution of postmodern culture and society, academic genres have undergone various changes. The study shows that cultural heterogeneity of academic genres, styles and discourses now gives way to an increasing hybridization and discusses theoretical aspects of this process. The second part focuses on specific dimensions of hybridization, in particular between global and local academic genres and discourses, and between real and virtual ones.

In Making Your Own Days, celebrated poet Kenneth Koch writes about poetry as no one has written about it before -- and as if no one had written about it before. Full of fresh and exciting insights and experiences, this book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it -- and for those who would like to read and write it better. Treating poetry not as a special use of language but, in fact, as a separate language -- unlike the one used in prose and conversation -- Koch is able to clarify the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens in a reader's mind and feelings while reading a poem.

Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works: lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation -- by poets past and present from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery. Each selection is accompanied by an illuminating explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text.

In this book, Kenneth Koch's genius for making poetry clear and for bringing out its real pleasures is everywhere apparent.

Are you required to present, pitch or speak to an audience? Whether it's your first presentation or you're an experienced speaker, this Authority Guide will give you the tools, tips and confidence to deliver engaging, creative and effective presentations. Steve Bustin, an award-winning business speaker (named UK Speaker of the Year 2015 by the Professional Speaking Association), an executive-level speech coach and corporate presentation skills trainer, will teach you simple but effective techniques to keep your audience engaged.

Somali Oral Poetry and the Failed She-Camel Nation State: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Deelley Poetry Debate (1979-1980) examines the most expressive medium in Somali culture and politics, that is, oral poetry, in its ideological and discursive dimension. Oral poetry has a formidable impact on Somali society and its internal dynamics. Somali Oral Poetry is the first critical discourse analysis of the connection between oral poetry and politics in Somalia. The book brings out contradictions and conflicts between the ways of thinking of a society structured in clans and a rightful claim for nationhood and the state of law. In addition, it highlights the difficulty the society finds in renouncing clan mentality that requires loyalty to the clan rather than to the State. The present volume illuminates, through the critical analysis of the Deelley poetry debate, the circumstances and issues that preceded the civil war in Somalia. Therefore, the book is of particular interest for its original explanation and understanding of the extraordinary subsequent failure of the State in Somalia.

The concept of crowdfunding, where grassroots creative projects are funded by the masses through websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, has been steadily gaining attention over the last few years. Crowdfunding the Future undertakes a dynamic interdisciplinary approach to the examination of the new, and growing, phenomenon of crowdfunding and its encompassment of digital society and media industries. The book offers a wide range of perspectives and empirical research, providing analyses of crowdfunded projects, the interaction between producers and audiences, and the role that websites such as Kickstarter play in discussions around fan agency and exploitation, as well as the ethics of crowdfunding. With a series of chapters covering a global range of disciplines and topics, this volume offers a comprehensive overview on crowdfunding, examining and unraveling the international debates around this increasingly popular practice. The book is suitable for courses covering media studies, fandom, digital media, sociology, film production, anthropology, audience, and cultural studies.