Writing studies seems so much more serious than anything going on in speech communication rhetoric to me these days. I think what’s most attractive is the focus on the idea of pedagogy. This requires the assumption that people can change if we give them opportunity to do so, and that opportunity exists in the carefully crafted use of language.

Some refutatio: No, it doesn’t mean this is the only way to change people. No, not everyone is always willing or able to change. But it does require some civic faith to live in a democratic order – part of that faith is not dismissing the assumption before you’ve had a go.

These things apply to speech comm rhetoric as well, but public speaking has been set aside as something irrelevant to the work of the verbal rhetoricians. The important thing is criticism not creation: The work that is to be valued doesn’t happen with students, it happens in monographs. Teaching is something that isn’t valued as a site of academic work by speech communication rhetoricians.

This isn’t everyone; there are speech comm rhetoricians who care about teaching, but their teaching is ironic in relation to what counts as good research in the field. You see people teaching modality as the heart of rhetoric, teaching peer-reviewed sources as the only form of evidence while writing and publishing about the speech that gets lost in between civic forms of power and testimony that is rejected as evidence by power because of race. If this appears in the public speaking curriculum, it would be a very rare thing indeed!

But in writing studies it seems that modality has been replaced by this idea of improvement through practice and reflection. This is what public speaking should be. I try to make it more like this, but I think I need more instruction from writing studies. There’s a depth there I can’t really seem to get into. So I’m trying to assemble a reading list for myself from the syllabi I can find online from writing studies graduate seminars.

In speech communication, there’s no premium on teaching whatsoever. Maybe it’s changed? I hope so. It’s assumed that if you have a tournament debate background you can teach argumentation. It’s assumed you can teach public speaking if you have been accepted to a graduate program. What training you get, or what supervision you get is really random. I know of a couple of programs where that supervision is from a lawyer – someone without an academic degree.

This is too much separation between graduate studies and teaching to be productive, and I hope maybe in writing studies I can find something to help me unlearn a few things.