Based upon author's Ph.D. dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1966.

The teaching of public speaking and oral presentation is a challenge to many business communication instructors. One solution is an interdisciplinary approach involving the cooperation of the speech and business administration departments. In the first week of the quarter the business communications instructor has conferences with the students to…

Suggestions for the development of a national perspective on the place of functional communication competencies in the speech communication curriculum are presented in this paper. The first section of the paper describes current trends in functional communication curriculum development, including the theoretical perspectives underlying various…

The organized experience of the Testing, Research and Data Processing Division of the University of Maryland, College Park, Counseling Center of attending a national convention and making presentations is discussed and evaluated. In evaluating the various aspects of the experience, participants agreed that "debugging" their presentation…

Forty undergraduate students were subjects in a study to discover students' attitudes toward language and grammar and to determine how the demand for grammatical correctness affected them in preparing and delivering public speeches. The subjects each completed an 11-item interview schedule that elicited demographic information as well as feelings…

This publication is a handbook for water pollution control personnel to guide them towards a successful public relations program. This handbook was written to incorporate the latest methods of teaching basic public information techniques to the non-professional in this area. Contents include: (1) a rationale for a public information program; (2)…

Students in the traditional public speaking course spend the bulk of their time in listening, yet little structure is given to this time to improve its educational value. The assumption underlying the Critical Listening in Public Speaking (CLIPS) Index is that students' listening time can be used to learn more about public speaking by using a…

Of 782 undergraduate students enrolled in either interpersonal communication or public speaking courses, the 125 students scoring high in communication apprehension were retested upon completion of the courses and analyzed for their responses to a student attitudes survey. Significantly greater numbers of the high communication apprehensive (HCA)…

This is a historical study of the emergence of feminist rhetoric in the South. Feminism in the United States is associated with the abolition movement for it was the disaffected delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 who, after being refused participation in that conference because they were women, organized the Seneca Falls…

This study is a descriptive/historical account focusing on the obscenity issue and the selected manuscript speeches of Dean Burch while he served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from October 1969 to March 1974. Research centers on the speaker and the specific manuscript speeches, considering the timeliness and…

The identification techniques in Herbert C. Kelman's schema of identification were used to analyze the near, and perhaps surprising, success of Rep. Frances (Sissy) Farenthold's bid for the Democratic Texas gubernatorial nomination in 1972. Opposing government corruption, Farenthold overcame the potential obstacles of being a politically liberal…

This study attempted to determine whether it is more effective for a speaker to cite sources of authority for any assertions he makes within a speech or whether he should simply assimilate the assertions into the text without citation. The subjects for the experiment (145 students in a basic college speech communications course) listened to two…

There is valid criticism that contest debate practices constitute both a reality gap between contest debate and actual public communication, and a closed feedback loop among coaches, judges, and debaters. However, remedial and preventive action is possible if forensics directors are highly motivated to work within a broad program of communication…

Any discussion of the dimensions of contemporary political campaigning would not be complete without some consideration of heckling; for heckling, or the questioning of a speaker while he is in the act of speaking, has become a salient element on the political scene. In attempting to diminish the heckler's impact, the speaker usually appeals to…