I predict here in a short amount of time I’ll be posting some definitive news about a move happening in intercollegiate forensics and debate that will no-doubt signal the end of any sort of conflict between educationally-minded directors of debate and those who love prizes, trophies, and saying that they coached a team to win…

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Before we get into it, here’s my current obsession. I wonder why I share any of my Last FM listening stats with anyone because all you will see is me grinding a song into oblivion by listening to it over and over and over again. Today I’ve reached the point where I’m just listening to…

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Argumentation pedagogy is, unfortunately, homogenous across nearly the entire speech communication discipline. A textbook based on the Toulmin model – but not even the whole model, just data, warrant, and claim – and no discussion of field dependency is at the heart of it. A paper about a controversy and then the fabled “Letter to…

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Spring break ended too soon but I did get one final draft out and have another one underway. We’ll see if I can make the NCA deadline. I get a lot out of NCA but it comes out of the cracks. It’s not a direct path to the value of it. I always have a…

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Spring break is here and the only thing I’ve done so far is play about 5 hours of Fallout 76 before getting ready to go out to eat at one of my favorite spots before hitting a bar to wish a friend happy birthday. There is a productive hope for spring break including: Finishing my…

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Next Tuesday (March 5) I am appearing in a performance about speeches by actual speechwriters and writers of that hardest form of rhetoric, comedy. They told me I can speak about anything I want related to rhetoric, so I think I’ll speak about the upcoming season of political debates, Presidential and otherwise. It’s always a…

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More strange than academics engaging the public is the idea that academics engaging the public is strange. In the field of rhetoric, we’ve nearly totally pulled away from this idea. Debate teams exist at the margins of rhetoric and communication departments, structured like sport teams. Faculty push to publish in journals were 7 to 10…

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We need local community platforming for rhetors, speech, debates, and argument. We have to lead it and we need it locally. We cannot rely on privately owned corporate communication platforms to curate, cultivate, and teach people how to engage in public deliberation and argument. In the past the Town Hall was the way of doing…

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I just read Steven Salaita’s new blog where he writes a very nice, very long piece about his new job as a school bus driver in the Washington D.C. area. It’s really good, really well written. But it’s not good rhetoric. Salaita describes being a school bus driver in very noble terms, anchoring his description…

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Surfing around this morning and discovered that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Measure of a Man” has it’s 30th anniversary today! I feel pretty old. Here’s a great article talking about the history of the episode and its production. In this episode, Starfleet has a hearing to determine if Data has rights. He’s…

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