Tag: rhetoric

  • The Fallacy of the Banned Public Speaking Class Topic

    Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.…

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  • A Case of Tarmac Rhetoric

    It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s…

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  • Infrequently Asked Questions

    Circle-no-questions (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Why do I feel that coming to an event like this, ostensibly only about debating, do I find more people interested in my research and interested in my writing than I found among the professors in my field that I studied with in graduate school? Why is it that “the choice”…

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  • Opportunity, to teach

    This article is timed perfectly for me. I’ve been thinking about how to re-create (recreate?) my public speaking class. Like a computer, public speaking gets slow, frustrating, and doesn’t help you produce anything good unless you reformat it and do a clean install of the operating system from time to time. This essay is really…

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  • Style and Performance and Argument

    Image via Wikipedia Lama Tsony on Crazy Wisdom Crazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.” Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation…

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  • Annoyed

    I absolutely hate the transition from spring to summer. My conversion into the enemy of my childhood self is complete. When I was younger this was my favorite moment of the year. Now it just means I don’t get to do any of the things I like to do for three months. And it’s a…

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  • Two Related Observations: The Consumerist Mind

    Not really in the office today as my good friend who teaches debate in the U.K. (as well as around the world) is staying with me. He’s catching up on his jet lag and we are about to hit the bar in an hour or so. Can’t think of a better way to spend an…

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  • Adversarial versus Agonistic in American Politics

    I would like to be able to claim that I was dissapointed with Obama’s acceptance speech from Denver last night, but I wasn’t. It was so mind-numbingly predictable that it met every one of my cynical expectations for a convention acceptance address. Even the dim glimmers of anything that differentiated Obama from previous candidates had…

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