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.

Speech quality increases the less restrictions you give students on topics and the more instruction you give them in terms of how to develop a topic. Public speaking instructors suffer from the idea that in order to increase the quality of speeches they must police the nature of the topic, banning a number of topics that they associate with poor quality orations.

This is the most common fallacy of the public speaking professor, the fallacy of causation between particular topics and bad speeches. It isn’t the topic choice that causes the poor speech, nor is it the nature of the topic. There are a few causes of this – namely three problems with topic approach that the instructor should address through teaching rhetoric instead of teaching orientation toward the “right position” on an issue or “a better topic” or even “good sources.” These things won’t address the core of the problem.

First, most of the topics that are associated with bad speeches – abortion, drug legalization, gun restrictions – are huge topics that cannot be taken on just as they are. They require a walk through the stasis in order to discover what the best point of contention is. They require examination through the general and specific topics of Aristotle and Cicero. They require acknowledgement that a young person is speaking on the topic, someone with little to no credibility. All these things are usually ignored by the instructor in favor of “get good sources.” But speech should be a lot more than a way to measure someone’s ability to evaluate research sources.

Another issue with these topics is that instructors might consider them “too real” and inappropriate for the classroom. this defense makes little sense to me. It’s one thing to criticise the university for not teaching “real world” skills or having applicability outside the gates. It’s another for instructors to deliberately restrict the content of a course to be removed from the things that people are speaking about and attempting to persuade one another about most often. Even moreso, consider that the course is meant to help people become better at such speech, and the instructor saying “There is no point in discussing these issues since persuasion is impossible.” This seems like a reason to reconsider the necessity of a speech course in totality, not an adaptation to make the course better.

Audiences are audiences. A university student audience brings with them into the classroom the assumptions, ideology, and values they have. A speech on a controversy is a wonderful way to gain class attention and connect the principles of good oratory into something they are experiencing directly and can connect to their life experiences. Of course, nobody should feel compelled to change their mind on an issue, but that’s an important consideration for oratory as well. These principles of democratic engagement are really not taught anymore. We teach young people that they are fools if they do not dissolve their opinions in the light of the facts. Instead, why not discuss how difficult it is to understand the fact, understand ideology, and negotiate the feelings and thoughts that surround any controversy they might face. Giving students a plan for future encounters with oratory might be more important than practice in making the same old designs on safe topics.

Speaking of safe, this word is probably the centerpiece of the most serious objection to particular topics, and that is the concept of the “safe space.” The trouble with safe spaces has been argued to death all over the internet, and I won’t rehearse those arguments here. The only thing I can add to this conversation is the danger of assuming there is a place that is free of persuasion and argument. Although safe-space considerations are well meaning and aimed at helping students feel comfortable and get in the mental space to engage learning, the idea that they would be immune or free from convincing speech is extremely dangerous. We are always vulnerable to it. And people who are not well-meaning at all will take advantage of those who feel that there’s a space that is persuasion or argument free.

When people want a safe space, what they want is a space that is free of aggressive, hostile, and bad argumentation or speech. This has been conflated with all persuasion and all oratory because in contemporary America, we are horrible at this. We have been taught, and continue to teach that facts are facts, they are easy to obtain, easy to understand, and that in their presence we should just change our mind without hesitation. This anti-human, monstrous position is responsible for people’s negative feelings about political conversation, their aversion to argument, and their desire to be away from oratory. The solution is to provide oratory as the fine art that it is. If speech teachers and public speaking courses are not going to do this, we have little hope to find it in other places.

Public speaking is oratory, and oratory is an art that connects humans and allows human beings to see themselves connected to one another in new ways. “Consubstantiality” is what Kenneth Burke called the art of rhetoric. This has been forgotten, or is just unknown to contemporary teachers. We tend to automatically think that speech and oratory are a violent interruption of our lives, separating us from what we know and believe, challenging us to accept new and different beliefs. This can be the case. But this other relation is where oratory is at its most artistic, creating moments where we see new connection and take on shared identity, seeing a place for future possibility.

I have a lot more to think about in terms of creating digital speech. The internet has become an art gallery of oratory, with preserved speech hanging there, waiting for us to stop for a bit as we walk or surf by. More on that later as I think about these wonderful orations that the students are producing this term.