Presidential use of television has significantly increased over the last 20 years, with most requests for air time being accepted. This has put out-of-power political parties at a disadvantage when attempting to gain support for their platform. Although Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934 provides for some response time to uninterrupted…

Although many metaphors were developed throughout the Free Speech Movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, the central metaphor of the movement was the university as a factory. The analogy was used to argue that trends in higher education were moving toward the dehumanization of students and was related to the national…

Noting that while the literature clearly states a need for colleges and universities to teach students critical thinking skills from a liberal arts perspective, this paper points out that there are few descriptions of how these skills can be taught. Using the canons of classic rhetoric, the literature is reviewed to discover the skills that arise…

The rhetorical appropriateness of two of Shirley Chisholm's persuasive speeches on women's liberation were assessed using Afrocentric criteria for speech criticism developed by Molefi K. Asante (1979). The speeches addressed the controversy of whether the women's liberation movement was appropriate for women of minority cultures in the United…

Those seeking or those who have obtained a communications degree often ask what they can do with their degree. Their quest for universal employment categories uniquely appropriate for communication majors is shaped by four beliefs: (1) content expertise is the primary asset the communication major brings to a potential employer; (2) communication…

In May 1914, the largest community pageant production ever staged in the United States, "The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis," was presented in St. Louis's Forest Park. This production, involving over 7,500 participants, was presented not merely for the enjoyment it might bring to its participants and audiences, but also for what the…

A wide range of interesting observations of the past decade, which may now cast their shadow as the health communication paradigm of the forthcoming decade, can be clarified and correlated. One example of effective communication therapy was Norman Cousins's hospitalization with the crippling disease, "ankylosing spondylitis." Using large doses of…

Recent controversy in the treatment of communication apprehension and avoidance has centered around whether an individual's communicative difficulties are caused by communicative (skills) deficiency or psychological problems (anxiety). Such debates are not new; arguments about whether to treat communicative difficulties from a communicative or…

A study was conducted (1) to investigate factors that influence an instructor's choice of behavior when confronted with incidents of students' poor communication performance, and (2) to demonstrate how attribution theory can be used as a vehicle for describing and understanding the causes of instructor reactions or behaviors. The study sought to…

This dissertation examines the effects of a subordinate's trust in an immediate superior, desire for promotion, and perception of supervisory influence upon several qualitative aspects of communication, which include perceived accuracy of communication, directionality of communications, and overall satisfaction with communications. Trust in an…

This investigation assessed the importance of orientation behavior on group consensus and the individual satisfaction of participants. Students in four sections of an introductory speech course rated each classmate on a seven-point scale according to orientation behavior as manifested in the ability to resolve conflict, reinforce agreement,…

The International Communication Agency (ICA) was created in April 1978 to help facilitate relations between the United States and other nations. Its main function is to enrich the supplies of information among peoples in order to enhance understanding. An examination of the international context in which the ICA will operate reveals the urgent…

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

The course on marital Communication outlined in this manual focuses participants' attention on the communicative bonds that maintain a functional relationship. The course is divided into three units: "Partner as Audience," designed to help individuals in a relationship see themselves as audiences sensitive to each other's messages; "Goals," which…

Two experiments investigating the efficiency of communication between 5th grade children from differing socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are described. In each experiment, 40 same-sex pairs, half male and half female, were formed into dyadic groupings by combining lower- and middle-SES children into the four possible speaker-listener combinations.…