Senator Robert LaFollette's speech to the United States Senate on "Free Speech and the Right of Congress to Declare the Objects of War," given October 6, 1917, epitomized his opposition to the war and the Wilson administration's largely successful moves to suppress public criticism of the war. In the speech he asserted his position on…

The interpretation of the history of rhetoric was the subject of the seminar reported in this document. After a preface and a discussion of the "promise" of rhetoric, abstracts of seminar presentations are grouped under the headings of rhetoric and culture, rhetoric and philosophy, methodological considerations, and discourse analysis.…

The purpose of this paper is to examine deception in advertising from a behavioral perspective, and to attempt to formulate a definition that can guide both research and governmental regulation. Whether or not an advertisement is said to be "deceptive" depends on the definition of deception being used. The position advocated here is that…

The purpose of this paper is to extend Gage Chapel's application of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad to the persuasive aspects of television programs and to examine its relevance to television criticism. The five concepts underlying a Burkeian analysis are discussed: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, and the elements within Burke's…

Recent behavioral research has challenged the relationship between speech organization and the communication variables of source credibility and attitude change. Two hundred eighty-seven students comprising six discussion sections of a basic speech course were exposed to videotaped versions of three separate speech conditions: a 30% disorganized…

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…

Since critical thinking is given a prominent place in language study, English education should be concerned with analyzing propaganda, not promoting it. In 1937 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was founded to combat the prolific rise of propaganda in the U.S. Since then many modifications have grown out of the continuing studies of critical…

This paper is a presentation of what a mass movement pressupposes rhetorically, as opposed to what a movement is in social or historical terms. The author outlines the functions of rhetoric in a movement, in order to establish how the metaphor operates as the essential rhetorical instrument. He states that a mass social or historical movement is…

This paper examines two basic tools of audience analysis as they are used in contemporary political campaingning: public opinion polls and interpretations of voter statistics. The raw data used in the statistical analyses reported in this investigation come from national polls and voter statistics provided to Republican candidates running in local…

At the fourth annual Cal-State Hayward Conference in Rhetorical Criticism, 25 upper division and graduate students from 17 western colleges and universities presented papers on rhetorical theory, history, and criticism. Panels of faculty members from the same colleges and universities, acting as editor-critics, rated five of these papers as…

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…

Prior attitudes and personal involvement with the subject of a message do not necessarily affect a listener's recollection of the speech or his assessment of the speaker's position. This is the conclusion of a study in which subjects listened to messages presenting positions for, against, and neutral on the topic of legalizing the use of…

Doublespeak can be defined as language which is purposely ambiguous, deceptive, or evasive. If we want to promote integrity between act and word, we must teach by living out of the kind of consistency which we hope for in others. Functioning honestly in departmental and pedagogical as well as other personal dealings can be the most effective thing…

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…

A shift from a classroom focus on persuasion and argumentation to a broader classroom focus on the communication of controversy might be beneficial to students. The course content should help students come to grips with their internal and external problems, rather than avoid them and seek only quick solutions. To aid students in dealing with…