Overcoming Life’s Challenges
One day a donkey fell into an old well. From a distance, the rancher heard the donkey crying out in hope of being rescued. Hearing the donkey in distress the rancher ran to the well. After examining the situation he …
Speaker Blog
More Than Shy: How to Cope With Social Anxiety
It’s a condition that can make leaving one’s house a terrifying ordeal. Ordering food at a restaurant can induce panic attacks. And the thought of speaking up in class or at a meeting can be so frightening that sufferers will …
THE RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
It is time to give some serious attention to the rhetorical analysis and
criticism of the public discourse of business leaders, in particular, contemporary
corporate officers. When Herbert Wichelns defined rhetorical
criticism as a thing separate from literary criticism in …
Finding the Right Speaker: 10 Things to Know
Purpose
What do you want the speaker to communicate? Is your focus motivation, entertainment, education, or some combination?
Format
What time of day and length of talk do you need? Not all speakers excel at all speaking formats.
Budget
Avoid …
Working On Your Shyness
I often question whether I really need to be a public speaker. As a paralegal, am I really required to speak in public? Do I really want to speak in public? If you were to ask me those questions 15 …
Cicero (106—43 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC and was murdered on December 7, 43 BC. His life coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and he was an important actor in many of the …
The Classical Argument
Since rhetors began teaching Greek farmers strategies for appealing their cases to Greek courts in the fifth century B.C., the classical argument has stood as a model for writers who believe their case can be argued logically and plausibly to …
LINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION
We have seen that linguists like to think of linguistic items as having fixed and stable properties, among other things inert, literal meanings. This way of looking at linguistic phenomena as objects is coupled with a very popular model of …
The Sources of the Written Language Bias in Linguistics
Traditionally linguists have been occupied with written language to a much greater extent than with spoken language. Even today, when much lip service is being paid to the need to study spoken language, we approach language with a conceptual apparatus …
SPEECH AND WRITING
Spoken language and speech communication
In a normal speech communication situation, a speaker tries to exert an influence on a listener (or a group of listeners) by making him (or them) perceive, understand, feel or do something particular. The speaker …