Customer Reviews

Art of Public Speaking

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I have taught from this book for almost five years now; it is in its seventh edition, has a CD Rom now that includes video clips. The book is comprehensive, and no single semester course can cover everything in it; but I think it is a great book to teach from. First, it is WELL WRITTEN. Next, it is organized well. Finally, the speeches it contains are great examples---both student speeches, and those from the public sector. I recommend to all my students NOT to sell it, but to keep it for reference later.

If you're like most people, you find yourself feeling a bit nervous when you need to face groups of people to make presentations or give talks. Some of this nervousness fades with time and experience, but if you read this book you'll have a definite advantage -- you'll be prepared!

I read this book in order to improve my public speaking skills, and I have found it to be consistently informative, helpful, clear, and inspirational. This book is most useful for those who have very little public speaking experience, and it provides guidelines for determining the purpose of your talk, giving some thought to who your audience will be, doing research, supporting your ideas, organizing the talk, and keeping the audience's interest while you're talking. I especially love the sample speeches provided in this book, and the side-bars for illustrating key concepts and ideas.

Anyone planning to speak in public will benefit from reading this book as they prepare!

Whatever happened to objectivity in academia among instructors, and especially among textbook writers? Well its gone out the door with academic freedom. The author rolls over backwards and forwards to be politically correct. The selected speech examples are full of leftist paraphernalia from an overbearing multiculturism to zealous advocacy of gun control. His section on demographic audience analysis should be called "How to patronize and placate your audience's minorities without offending them." The author's fixation on the "Slippery Slope" fallacy (Chap. 16) is really a subtle indictment of criticizing the ill effects of bad laws with the cause-and-effect method. The "Slippery Slope" is overtly political in its context and typically addresses growth of big government and the resulting tyranny of good intentions that comes. He really presses for gun control with this one. Of course, these days the leftist cultural imperialists consider objectivity as being consistent with the liberal PC dogma of the day. This book wouldn't be so bad, if it was more objective and laid off the Berkeley ideological bent.

This book is so far to the right it makes Ronald Reagan look like a Neo-Liberal. The assumptions the text makes about the classical speaker-subject "transmitting" a message to a "critical" listening audience is so passe and laughably bankrupt the text should be shredded and used as filler for a big GOP elephant. Seriously, if you want to learn about rhetoric there are plently of well written textbooks for college educated audiences that do make the simplistic assumption and fabulous fallacies that comprise this textbook.