Courses: Public speaking. Objective: This activity introduces and activates Monroe's Motivated Sequence.

Imagined interactions (IIs) constitute a type of social cognition that can reduce fear of communication. Through the mental preparation enabled by IIs, an individual can reduce disfluencies and mitigate the anxiety that arises from a speech. Study 1 indicated that rehearsal influences the reduction of silent pauses but not vocalized pauses. In…

Views from a Distance is a series of word clouds rendered from 35 chairs' addresses delivered at CCCC conventions from 1977 to 2011. The digital installation invites explorations of word-level patterns and anomalies within this widely recognized collection of speeches. The installation itself is underpinned with the assumption that distinctive…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

Research investigating public speaking anxiety treatments is subject to demand effects. This study tests the relative effectiveness of systematic desensitization (SD) and multiple treatment method (MT) containing visualization therapy against no-treatment and credible placebo controls. Data (N = 238) were collected at six points in a public…