When I was a graduate student in speech communication rhetoric, we never read any composition rhetoric scholars. I would find people like Steven Mailloux and Jan Swearingen and others back in those days, and I was told that the trouble with such work is that compositionists focus too much on teaching, not the larger picture. I was very confused by this because teaching is nothing but the larger picture. I wonder what the value of rhetorical criticism is, outside of a class environment, considering nobody but a very highly limited, paywalled, difficult to access journal in the deep corner of some database is the only place where you will ever find such work.

I believe this year I’m going to transform into a compositionist both theoretically and practically. The biggest advantage I have here is that I work in the oral tradition – speech and debate. Of course there are forms like speechwriting, and of course we can have debates that simmer on for centuries across thousands of pages of books. But what I know best, what I’m focused on and really feel like I have something good to share and help others with is with ideas shared via speech.

Speech gets a bad wrap, primarily from its own field, where it’s tossed aside as a collection of modalities one teaches like a ritual to young people. Again if rhetorical criticism was so important, why is that not the public speaking course? Anyway I can ask that question after everything I say here so I’ll just stop. The point is an easy one: The distance between our public speaking courses and what most speech communication rhetors do is so vast that most of our students wouldn’t be able to connect the introductory public speaking course to any other course in the major at the university.

Composition though is a direct line. All people teaching in writing programs, or teaching WAC, or composition, are also writing themselves, often a variety of different kinds of texts for different audiences, and are grappling with writing because they are engaged in the conversation with themselves in a way we aren’t. We are not interested in quality presentations, oral presentation, persuading and engaging audiences (just attend any NCA panel and you’ll see this first hand). Compositionists are very interested in reaching audiences through practice because they are doing it and they are deeply engaged in teaching themselves through a regular practice of writing.

Teaching public speaking this way would require a regular practice of speaking. Few rhetoricians do that in speech communication; they are too busy writing for an audience of 5 to 10 in paywalled journals. I wonder if podcasting/vlogging could ever gain legitimacy as a publication in the way that people are forced to treat written production in the academy?

Teaching this way also requires immersion in some other substance than modality. Modality is not about anything; it’s transparent. So teaching a “how to” speech isn’t teaching anything other than a mode of address. Wouldn’t it be better to engage some texts and then determine a mode of reaction/engagement/concurrence?

What I’ve done is assign a few books along the lines of Aristotle’s idea of three kinds of rhetorical approach: Forensic (speech about the past; what happened?) Epidictic (Speech about the present; what matters?) and Deliberative (Speech about the future; what should we do/be done?)

For Forensic rhetoric American Dialogue by Joseph Ellis; for Epidictic On Dialogue by David Bohm; and for Deliberative, On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason. Each one tries to engage in this kind of rhetoric that it is associated with: Ellis on arguing what happened with the constitution and rights and what that means today; Bohm setting up dialogue for high praise over other forms of discourse in society, and Magnason using family stories, nostalgia, illustration, and reflection to argue for immediate and swift response to the global climate crisis.

The other big change is that I’ve moved the speeches out of the classroom and onto the internet. I think web video – the technology of laptop and phone cameras and computers – is to be taken advantage of for the practice of speech. Where is the public now if not on the other side of some laptop screen somewhere? How are you my audience without ink and paper? It’s the same move and it should be investigated if not fully practiced. More on that later.

At the end of this semester (sometime around June I imagine) I’ll report back and follow up on this post to see how it went.