Debuting in its first edition, Advanced Public Speaking: A Leader's Guide is a comprehensive textbook designed to teach, model, and serve as a speech-making reference for upper level undergraduate students. This advanced, student-engagement focused, and flexible text offers students opportunities to increase their speaking abilities across a variety of more specific and complex contexts.

Providing a comprehensive survey of the empirical research, theory, and history of public speaking, this handbook fills a crucial gap in public speaking pedagogy resources and provides a foundation for future research and pedagogical development. Bringing together contributions from both up-and-coming and senior scholars in the field, this book offers a thorough examination of public speaking, guided by research across six key themes: the history of public speaking; the foundations of public speaking; issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion; considerations of public speaking across contexts; assessment of public speaking; and the future of public speaking in the twenty-first century. The evidence-based chapters engage with a broad discussion of public speaking through a variety of viewpoints to demonstrate how subtopics are connected and fraught with complexity. Contributors explore public speaking in education, business and professional settings, and political contexts, and outline how skills learned through public speaking are applicable to interpersonal, small group, and business interactions. Reinforcing the relevance, importance, and significance of public speaking in individual, interpersonal, social, and cultural communication contexts, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for public speaking instructors and program administrators. It will also be valuable reading for Communication Pedagogy and Introduction to Graduate Studies courses.

Culminating a decade of conferences that have explored presidential speech, The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric assesses progress and suggests directions for both the practice of presidential speech and its study. In Part One, following an analytic review of the field by Martin Medhurst, contributors address the state of the art in their own areas of expertise. Roderick P. Hart then summarizes their work in the course of his rebuttal of an argument made by political scientist George Edwards: that presidential rhetoric lacks political impact. Part Two of the volume consists of the forward-looking reports of six task forces, comprising more than forty scholars, charged with outlining the likely future course of presidential rhetoric, as well as the major questions scholars should ask about it and the tools at their disposal. The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric will serve as a pivotal work for students and scholars of public discourse and the presidency who seek to understand the shifting landscape of American political leadership.

Building on the premise that the 20th century has witnessed the rise of the `rhetorical presidency,' Ryan parses the public addresses of a master persuader. Overall, FDR's verbal gifts strengthened his hand while enriching the language of American politics. Ryan examines the mechanics of a typical Roosevelt speech, considering such factors as intonation, rhythm, and choice of metaphor, as well as Roosevelt's incomparable body language--these are the best parts of the book. Ryan effectively treats the question of authorship, arguing that although FDR wrote little of his own material, his speeches bore a distinct Roosevelt imprint. . . . Ryan's work makes clear why the packaging of a speech must be considered as significant as its substance. Choice This thought-provoking study makes a unique contribution to the literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt by focusing on his presidential rhetoric. Unlike previous works on Roosevelt, this volume demonstrates how he tried to persuade the public and the Congress, what rhetorical techniques he used, how he attempted to manage the reception of his messages through the press and the media, and what the effect was of his oratorical endeavors. It examines his leading orations on national and international issues, his persuasive campaign strategies and tactics, his four inaugural addresses, and his unsuccessful speeches against the Supreme Court and in the Purge. It further demonstrates how contemporary Americans responded to and received Roosevelt's rhetoric.

Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment.

Hoover, the president of economic depression; Roosevelt the president of recovery--the public images of these two men are so firmly fixed that they offer shorthand ways to talk about the era we know as the Great Depression. Yet their views on economic policy for taking the country out of its greatest economic calamity were not so different as is often supposed. Indeed, the famed journalist Walter Lippmann once claimed that Roosevelt's legislative measures represented "a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures." Moreover, both Hoover and Roosevelt shared a Keynesian conviction that public confidence was vital to recovery. They differed markedly, of course, in their ability to restore that confidence. Roosevelt's advantage lay not just in his position in the changing of the guard. He employed a skilled staff of speech writers, and he had the negative example of Hoover before him from which to plot rhetorical strategies that would be more effective. In Rhetoric as Currency, Houck uses the historical context of the Great Depression to explore the relationship of rhetoric to the economy and specifically economic recovery. He closely analyzes Hoover's rhetorical corpus from March 4, 1929, through March 3, 1933, and Roosevelt's from January 3, 1930, through June 16, 1933. This longitudinal study allows him to understand rhetoric as a process rather than a series of isolated, discrete products. Houck first examines Hoover's presidential rhetoric, tracing its paradoxes and the radical shift that occurred in the final year of his administration. The Depression, in his rhetoric, was a foe to be vanquished by an optimistic Christian and civic faith, not federal legislation. Once he determined that federal intervention was indeed required, he could not return to the dais; rather, he relied on an antagonistic press to carry his message of confidence. Abdicating the rhetorical pulpit, he left it in the hands of those opposed to him. Houck then studies the economic rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt as governor, candidate, president-elect, and finally president. He traces the key similarities and differences in Roosevelt's economic rhetoric with particular attention to an embodied economics, wherein recovery was premised less on mental optimism than a physical, active confidence.