Stand up, Speak out - The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking
As I was reading through the text, I considered whether it effectively complemented my lesson plans - and altogether, I feel it succeeded. The book goes into great depth in each of its major chapters, and offers students tips on how to tackle particular challenges. I can use the text as a general framework for introducing content and terminology, but ultimately the in-class exercises I’ve developed over time will be necessary to move students towards next steps.
The PDF version lacks a glossary and easily navigable Table of Contents, which is to its detriment. I’d encourage students to use the GitHub site if possible - though introducing the navigation aspects might take up valuable class time.
Altogether, I found the content to be straightforward and sensitive to a range of audiences. The authors are extremely thorough in their use of citations in the online version, but unfortunately some of these do not translate directly into the PDF. I find that they are consistently strong in attributions, offer objective examples, outline strong ethical behaviors and pose interesting questions for the reader.
Most of the text will be useful for the long-run. For instance, tips on how to grapple with anxiety or brainstorm original topics are fairly timeless. However, the authors will have to regularly add modern examples of political speech (e.g. updating for who’s in office) and cultural touchstones. The writers must be vigilant in maintaining active links - I found several “dead URLs” throughout the text, most of which direct to individually-maintained academic websites. It’s critical to keep these fresh to maintain the text’s credibility in the eyes of students and faculty.
The text is written in a clear and accessible style for students. At times, the authors overelaborate on certain points, but on the overall they do a nice job explaining topics. I feel the “Key Takeaways” are strong and straightforward - my opinion is that they could be used as models to retroactively edit several chapters in the interest of brevity.
The authors methodically define terms and explain concepts. In addition, they regularly signal what’s coming next, and do a nice job walking students through the transition from ideation to execution. The text has an even-keeled, encouraging and conversational tone, which helps keep the reader consistently engaged.
The authors do a nice job utilizing headings, subheadings and chapter designations. This was far more evident in the “online” version, where I was able to quickly jump within chapters via the Table of Contents and “Next Section” buttons. As per other textbooks I’ve used in the past, I will choose to present topics in an order I find most meaningful to my classroom. This book is organized in a way that makes this possible.
The book is capably modeled to tackle many of the fundamental topics in public speaking. I had little trouble following the authors’ arguments and ideas, and they effectively preview and review. I would prefer to see the outlining chapter introduced earlier, as this is a fundamental skill that we practice before thinking about major speech construction (often through reverse outlining). I believe that thinking broadly about speech framework before content creation is key - but that’s a personal teaching preference.
Because the text is 622 pages, I found the PDF version to be difficult to navigate on a personal computer - especially if I wanted to backtrack to a particular section. Nevertheless, the type is sufficiently large, and I can assign students chapters accordingly. Unfortunately, I cannot readily convert this to a printed text for students who prefer their readings in book form.
I believe the “online” version is far more usable. I could readily jump throughout the table of contents, and the authors did a nice job adding intra-text links. However, the plain text occasionally has formatting issues with citations. I’d suggest making the two versions consistent.
I did not find any significant grammatical errors in the book. There were some formatting issues with spacing, but I did not find these to be too distracting.
Given that the subject is Public Speaking, I feel the authors do a solid job clinically distinguishing between inclusionary and exclusionary language. However, I’d like to see more culturally engaging examples. For example, the “Presentation Aids” chapter could have used visuals representing arts and humanities in addition to the primarily scientific examples. I feel the authors could have included more examples of speech along the lines of Paulette Kelly’s “I Got Flowers Today” (page 367). It would be wonderful to use a compelling poem to demonstrate an assortment of rhetorical devices… One section I found off-putting was the example of the “entertainment speech” in Chapter 6. The speech uses an obscene acronym to create a “fictional university” that is insulting to residents of Harlem - an inappropriate and decidedly unamusing attempt at a joke. I believe the authors should choose a different speech and delete this one from the text.
I appreciate how the authors emphasized how to work with and correspond with librarians in the chapter on research. I often encourage students to begin building relationships with librarians - whether in person or virtually. It’s clear that they’ve done their due diligence in surveying experts, and I plan to reinforce this message of engagement.
While I found the research section to be authoritative, at times it turned into a bit of an information dump. It’s wonderful to see plenty of resources listed, but mentioning 9 different databases in one paragraph can be a bit excessive. Odds are my students don’t need a list of 11 major publishers in the Communication field.
However, I will say that I welcome the authors’ inclusion of full tables of citations in both MLA and APA style. I often send my students to Purdue’s “The OWL” website, and these tables serve as a strong counterpart.
Altogether, I can see myself using this book in the classroom. I was glad to see references to thinkers like Bakhtin, but I would also like to see greater attention paid to rhetorical theory. I feel that Richard Toye’s “Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction” would be a good complement to this textbook for an additional scholarly perspective.