Finished with my grade submission, so I’ve been doing some reading and watching these amazing bird feeder videos. They are so great, and I get to see a lot of birds I wouldn’t normally see. I don’t have a yard, or really any good scenery here in my New York City apartment, so this is the next best thing. It’s probably better, honestly than the wildlife I could attract with a feeder of my own.

Done with grades, but what’s my grade? What’s my mark for the term? I seriously failed, and I think the reason is that I have a strange, compartmentalized view of public speaking.

I think public speaking should be the performance of a certain kind of discourse that is marked for me with the signs of caring about audience. I don’t really know how else to do it, but what I need to figure out is how to get students to create, and how to evaluate, compositions not marked for me.

One way I was thinking of doing this was to mire the students in some discourse about an issue. The task would be to learn what the tropes, commonplaces, and other features of the discourse are, and try to extract or determine principles from the discourse.

I see this in three levels:
Deriving principles from a question

Deriving principles from a statement

Deriving principles from a discourse

All three are very different in my mind, and might require some future writing here about each one. For this post, I think it’s sufficient to say that we would try to trace back to whatever supports, or is assumed to be real, that is being articulated at the point of the creation of the discourse. We could call it perspective; many from the American rhetorical tradition might call this grounding, or backing, after Toulmin’s work.

The point is to find grounding for things like facts and evidence, not to teach these concepts in the abstract, like so many people in my field do. Something a communication scholar should never say is “The reason that speech is unpersuasive is because you didn’t have good facts in it!” This is ideological and unsupported by research in persuasion, argumentation, communication, et. al. Go down the list, you’ll see that nobody supports this view, even if they want to, because ironically, the research doesn’t support it.

Giving the students the tools of being able to articulate whatever the beliefs are of a discourse group and find handholds in that group seems like a practice they can carry around with them so they can ensure, or at least give themselves a chance to give their words purchase in a situation. Public speaking is an art, a situational art, that is derived from the moment when one interjects and has to speak, or calls a group of people together under the term audience, either implicitly or explicitly. It is not a formal set of skills and rules where one ensures one has 3 book sources for an “informative speech,” whatever the hell that is.

The future is not looking good right now for the university, so all fields should do some soul searching to find out their own principles and practices, what keeps their field alive and interesting; what makes it something that someone would want to be a part of, be included in, and think about for the rest of their lives. In rhetoric you’d think we would have a huge advantage here – but then you look at our public speaking pedagogy, you look at who directs public speaking programs, and you look at research faculty who regularly call public speaking “punishment” and think of it as a waste of time. We are our biggest obstacle in this.