This chapter outlines an approach to the introductory public speaking course that recaptures the ethical and civic spirit of the classical rhetorical tradition while taking into account the demographic and technological changes of the twenty-first century. With indicators of America's civic health in decline, such an approach to public speaking is needed now more than ever. The guiding questions of the chapter include: What would it mean to approach public speaking as a form of democratic education? How would focusing on civic life change how and what we teach in the public speaking classroom? Finally, what difference would it make—for students, for teachers, and for society—if we took such an approach to public speaking? In pursuing these questions, I will explore both the promise and the challenges of teaching public speaking as civic education, especially in today's climate of hyper-partisanship and political polarization.

A lot has happened since March 15 2016, when the U.S. Senate passed a resolution marking “National Speech and Debate Education Day” (S. Res. 398, 2016). In one of the most contentious and polarizin...

In light of the U.S. Senate’s designation of March 15, 2016 as “National Speech and Debate Education Day” (S. Res. 398, 2016), it only seems fitting that Communication Education devote a special se...

Other| June 01 2015 Rhetorical Studies and the Gun Debate: A Public Policy Perspective J. Michael Hogan; J. Michael Hogan J. Michael Hogan is Liberal Arts Research Professor and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Craig Rood Craig Rood Craig Rood is a Ph.D. student in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (2): 359–372. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0359 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Michael Hogan, Craig Rood; Rhetorical Studies and the Gun Debate: A Public Policy Perspective. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2015; 18 (2): 359–372. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.2.0359 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Forum: Responses to Collins on the Second Amendment You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay examines an early alternative to polling, Mass-Observation (M-O), that dramatically reported on the nuances, contradictions, and passions of public opinion during some of the most extraordinary times in British history. Between the Abdication Crisis of 1937 and the start of World War II, M-O’s combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, along with its emphasis on the cultural context of public opinion, produced a richer, more textured, and more deliberative rhetoric of public opinion than the Gallup poll’s survey techniques. In the process, M-O foreshadowed many of today’s scholarly trends, including the reflexive turn in social research, increased skepticism about the knowledge claims of science, and the emergence of more public scholarship.

I fırst met Jim Aune 33 years ago, when we were both starting out as assistant professors at the University of Virginia (UVa). Jim had come to UVa after just a year at Tulane, and I was fresh out of graduate school, ABD fromWisconsin. I was thrilled to bemaking $17,500; Jim, with his Ph.D. in hand, started at $18,000. We were both surprised and a bit overwhelmed to fınd ourselves in tenure-track jobs at a prestigious “public Ivy,” Mr. Jefferson’s university. Beyond that, however, we had almost nothing in common.Hewas the bookish intellectual, the editor of his school newspaper, involved in speech and theater, a poetry lover, and a serious student of the human condition. I was none of those things. In high school, I did not hang out with kids like Jim Aune, and he avoided kids like me. At Virginia, however, we developed a very special friendship—a friendship that reminded me of those old war movies, where privates from different backgrounds bond under fıre. I will never forget the question Jim asked me the fırst time we met: “So, what’s your religious background?” I had never been asked that question before, and certainly not by a complete stranger. Where I grew up (in the Black Hills of South Dakota), that sort of personal question could get you shot. But Jim believed that religion and ethnic heritage could tell you a lot about a person. The fact that one was a Norwegian Lutheran or an Irish Catholic was, for Jim, an important marker of cultural identity. So when I declined to answer the question he seemed a bit suspicious. Nevertheless, he helped me move into the little house I had rented outside Charlottesville,

T he study of persuasion can be traced back to ancient Greece, the birthplace of both rhetoric and democracy. As Dillard and Pfau (2002) noted in the first edition of The Persuasion Handbook, Aristotle “provided the first comprehensive theory of rhetorical discourse” (p. ix) in the fifth century BCE, and persuasion was central to that theory. Yet persuasion has not always been at the center of rhetorical theory. During the Enlightenment, the scope of rhetoric broadened to include aesthetic and psychological concerns, rendering persuasion secondary to considerations of “taste” and “sympathy.” More recently, narrative and dramatistic theories of rhetoric have emphasized identity or “identification” over persuasion, and some rhetorical scholars have even denounced persuasion as a mechanism of “control and domination” (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 2). Still, persuasion has remained a dominant theme in the rhetorical tradition, with two broad concerns distinguishing the rhetorical perspective from more scientific or empirical approaches to persuasion: a focus on the political or civic contexts of persuasion, and an overriding emphasis on ethical concerns. In this chapter, I survey the rhetorical tradition with a view toward illuminating some of the differing, even competing, perspectives on persuasion over the long history of rhetorical studies. In the process I highlight two cultural imperatives that help to account for the emphasis on politics and ethics in the Western rhetorical tradition: (1) the need to educate for citizenship, and (2) an ongoing debate over the rules or norms of democratic deliberation. In the rhetorical tradition, these two imperatives link the study of rhetoric to democratic theory, inspiring normative conceptions of persuasion that emphasize the responsibilities that go along with the right of free speech in a democracy. By surveying how rhetorical theorists historically have distinguished responsible or legitimate free speech from propaganda and demagoguery, I illuminate the intimate connections between rhetorical theories of persuasion and democracy itself. I begin by revisiting the classical/humanistic roots of the rhetorical tradition, from the sophists of ancient Greece to the Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian. I then sketch the history of rhetorical theory through modern times, Persuasion in the Rhetorical Tradition

Table of Contents: PART ONE Public Speaking in a Democratic Society Chapter 1 Public Speaking and Democratic Citizenship Public Speaking and Civic Engagement The Rhetorical Tradition Communication Challenges of the Twenty-first Century The Responsible Citizen-Speaker Chapter 2 The Ethical Public Speaker The Engaged Citizen Getting Involved in Politics The Ethics of Public Speaking Deliberation and Demagoguery in the Media Age Chapter 3 Preparing to Speak with Commitment and Confidence Public Speaking as Civic Engagement Preparing Yourself to Speak Speaking with Confidence Chapter 4 The Listener as Engaged Citizen The Importance of Effective Listening Understanding Barriers to Good Listening Guidelines for Improving Listening Chapter 5 Diverse Audiences in a Democratic Society Understanding Diverse Audiences Identifying Individual Listener Needs and Values Identifying Communal Needs and Values Gathering Information for Audience Adaptation Ongoing Strategies for Audience Adaptation PART TWO Developing Your Speech Chapter 6 Developing Significant Topics Finding a Suitable Topic Narrowing the Topic Ethical Obligations in Selecting a Topic General Purposes Crafting a Specific Purpose Testing Specific Purposes Constructing a Thesis Statement Chapter 7 Responsible and Productive Research A Productive Start The Creative Enterprise of Building a Speech Investigating Like a Professional: Utilizing Library Resources Searching the World Wide Web Gathering Information through Interviews Gathering Information through E-mail Citing Sources of Quoted and Paraphrased Material Chapter 8 Supporting Your Ideas with Evidence Supporting Ideas with Evidence Testing Evidence Chapter 9 Organizing Your Speech The Importance of Good Organization Determining When an Idea Is a Good One How Patterns of Organization Connect Ideas Guidelines for Organizing Your Speech Using Transitions as Connectives Introducing Your Speech Concluding Your Speech Chapter 10 Outlining Your Speech Types of Outlines Basic Principles of Outlining PART THREE Presenting Your Speech Chapter 11 Using Language Effectively Language and Meaning Using Language That Is Clear and Accurate Using Language That Is Interesting Using Language that Is Appropriate to the Situation Responding Critically to a Speaker's Style Chapter 12 Delivering Your Speech Effectively Sounding Good versus Being Sound Principles of Good Delivery Speaking Extemporaneously Alternative Styles of Delivery Responding to Audience Questions Chapter 13 Supporting Your Ideas Visually Functions of Presentational Aids Encouraging Emotional Involvement Options for Presentational Aids Guidelines for Preparing Presentational Aids Guidelines for Using Presentational Aids PART FOUR Types of Public Speaking Chapter 14 Speaking to Inform Functions of Informative Speeches Types of Informative Speeches Organizing the Informative Speech How Audiences Learn from Informative Speeches Chapter 15 Persuasive Speaking in a Democratic Society The Anatomy of Public Controversy Questions of Fact, Value, and Policy Ethical Proof in Persuasive Speaking Appealing to Audience Emotions Chapter 16 Arguing Persuasively Persuasion and Demagoguery in a Free Society Constructing a Reasonable Argument The Forms of Reasoning Fallacies of Reasoning and Evidence Chapter 17 Speaking on Special Occasions Ceremonial Speaking in a Free Society Social Values in Ceremonial Speaking The Forms of Ceremonial Speech Style and Delivery in Ceremonial Speaking Chapter 18 Speaking and Deliberating in Groups Understanding Public Deliberation Group Structures That Encourage Dialogue and Deliberation Factors That Influence Effective Group Deliberation Group Presentations Guidelines for Deliberating in Groups

Journal Article Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century Get access Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century. Ed. by Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. xii, 278 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-3466-9.) J. Michael Hogan J. Michael Hogan Penn State University University Park, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 1, June 2011, Pages 277–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar079 Published: 01 June 2011

The Biographer and His Biases - Merrill D. Peterson. The President and His Biographer: Woodrow and Ray Stannard Baker. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xii + 262 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-2654-4. - Volume 8 Issue 2

Throughout his career, George Gallup, the "father" of modern polling, crusaded tirelessly to establish polling's scientific and cultural legitimacy. In public speeches, several books, and more than a hundred articles in journals and popular magazines, Gallup mythologized polling's history of "progress," deflected doubts about the polls' accuracy and technical procedures with a rhetoric of scientific mystification, and celebrated the collective wisdom of "the people." Gallup's "rhetoric of scientific democracy" sustained polling's cultural legitimacy, yet it also diverted attention from its most perplexing sources of error and stifled debate over its deleterious effects on the democratic process.

Demagoguery and Democratic Deliberation:The Search for Rules of Discursive Engagement J. Michael Hogan (bio) and Dave Tell (bio) "For democracy to work," as Patricia Roberts-Miller writes, people "have to talk," and "the ability of the general public to make appropriate decisions depends to a large degree on the quality of public discourse." If democratic deliberation is to produce sound collective judgments, people must look beyond their own "self-interest and limited points of view" and join with others in determining the "general interest" or the "common good." Moreover, there must be "rules" to guide our deliberations, lest they degenerate into name-calling, confrontation, or even coercion and violence. Roberts-Miller is right: for democratic deliberation to work, we must have "rules" for what constitutes "good public discourse."1 Yet there is a dilemma. Too often, the "rules" of public deliberation have "acted (in consequence, if not intention) to exclude already marginalized groups," as Roberts-Miller observes. Indeed, such rules have tended to dismiss, a priori, "the very kind of rhetoric most likely to effect social change by or on behalf of the oppressed": the rhetoric of "populist" social movements. In her view, this is because the rules for "good public discourse" have, in the past, upheld an "objective" ideal, privileging unemotional, materialist, and quantifiable discourse. Quoting Linda Alcoff, Roberts-Miller worries about the "tyranny" of a "subject-less, value-less" conception of objectivity, for such an ideal has the "effect of authorizing those scientific voices that have universalist pretensions and disauthorizing personalized voices that argue with emotion, passion, and open political commitment."2 Hence the dilemma. On the one hand, we need rules of discursive engagement if our deliberations are to be civil and productive. On the other hand, such rules may exclude those voices already marginalized or silenced. Roberts-Miller has raised some important questions, and we applaud her commitment to reinvigorating our deliberative democracy. Yet she largely ignores a whole tradition of scholarship that has long grappled with the dilemma between rules and inclusion, and her attempt to resurrect "demagoguery" as the key term of a new critical rhetoric does not really resolve that dilemma. Contrary to Roberts-Miller's assertion, interest in "demagoguery" [End Page 479] has never "lapsed" in rhetorical studies, although the term—for good reason—has fallen into disfavor. Students of American public address have always been concerned with the basic question she raises: how do we draw the line between responsible and irresponsible (or "demagogic") discourse in a democratic society? And in their efforts to accommodate dissent, such scholars already have "bent the rules" about as far as they can without condoning coercion or violence. We begin by reviewing how, since at least the 1960s, students of public address have addressed the dilemma Roberts-Miller identifies: how do we uphold rules for "good public discourse" without "condemning all activist rhetoric?"3 Over the years, as we shall see, rhetorical scholars have gone to great lengths to legitimize "activist" discourse, even to the point of rationalizing obscenity and threats as rhetorical tactics. In recent years, the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way, as more scholars have become concerned with the breakdown of democratic deliberation in America. Yet even as they search for new rules of discursive engagement, scholars have remained sensitive to the need for inclusion. Resurrecting demagoguery might be useful in the effort to fashion a new critical rhetoric, as Roberts-Miller suggests. But unless we dismantle old stereotypes and distinguish carefully between rhetorical and political definitions of the term, "demagogue" will remain "more of an epithet than an analytical term"—a label that we use simply to "discredit those who offend our rhetorical or ideological sensibilities."4 The Social Movement Dilemma In communication studies, scholars have grappled with Roberts-Miller's "dilemma" since at least the 1960s, when public address scholars first took an interest in the rhetoric of social movements. In Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, Edwin Black identified "the movement study" as one of three "distinct approaches to the practice of rhetorical criticism," and he praised Leland Griffin's pioneering work on the rhetoric of social movements for opening "a new and exciting prospect...

Reviewed by: The Evolution of Presidential Polling J. Michael Hogan The Evolution of Presidential Polling. By Robert M. Eisinger. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp ix + 218. $60.00. Since the 1930s, as Robert M. Eisinger observes, "all presidents with the exception of Harry Truman have privately polled citizens" (1). Why do presidents poll? And how have they used that polling data? According to Eisinger, those questions remain largely unanswered because neither students of the presidency nor of polling have systematically investigated the history of presidential polling. In The Evolution of Presidential Polling, Eisinger sets out to fill that gap by investigating presidential polling from FDR to Clinton. Eisinger is not the first to write about the topic; he lists a number of other works on the subject in his bibliography. Still, Eisinger's contribution is significant. As the most comprehensive study of presidential polling yet, Eisinger fills important gaps in our understanding of how particular presidents have used private polling, and he provides a sense of how presidential polling evolved from a small, secretive enterprise to an important and accepted component of the modern "rhetorical" presidency. As a political scientist, Eisinger takes an institutional rather than a historical or rhetorical approach to his topic. Arguing that presidents have used private polls primarily to achieve autonomy from other political institutions, he organizes most of the book around presidential relations with Congress, the political parties, and the media. He begins with two introductory chapters [End Page 527] recalling some of the early history of polling and summarizing the level of interest in polls among presidents from FDR to Clinton. He also grounds the study in the literature on tensions between the presidency and other political institutions, including Tulis's work on the rhetorical presidency. In chapters 3 and 4, Eisinger reviews how presidents from Hoover to Nixon have sought to gauge public opinion independently of Congress, attributing those efforts to "the chief executive's strained relations with the legislative branch" (35). In chapter 5, he takes a similar approach to political parties, again arguing that "strained relations between presidents and their parties" have generated "a need by the executive branch to gauge public opinion autonomously" (74). In the sixth chapter, the institutional focus shifts to the media but the argument remains the same: by conducting their own polls, Eisinger concludes, presidents from FDR to Nixon have "snatched the powerful tool of public opinion assessment away from a potential adversary—the media—and into their own hands" (135). Chapter 7 breaks from the institutional approach of the earlier chapters to consider a possible "counterargument": that presidents poll not to circumvent other political institutions, but simply because polls provide "better indicators of the public mood than their alternatives" (136). The two explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course, but Eisinger dismisses the alternative explanation and concludes that "politics drove and continues to actuate private polling by presidents" (144). In an eighth chapter coauthored with Andrew Zahler, Eisinger extends the chronology of his investigation into the "post-Watergate era" with assessments of polling in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. In a final chapter on presidential polling in the "post-Reagan era," Eisinger concludes that both George H. W. Bush and Clinton were "keenly interested in monitoring public opinion polls" (173), with Bush often reading "poll-related information" provided by his senior advisers and Clinton using polls much as his predecessors did: to help frame his message and to pressure Congress to support his legislative agenda. Eisinger presents a wealth of fascinating and sometimes disturbing archival evidence of presidents using polls to determine their campaign strategies or to shape their public relations efforts while in office. Not surprisingly, some of the most manipulative uses of the polls occurred during the Nixon administration, as H. R. Haldeman directed a top-secret polling operation designed to market the president and to discredit his political "enemies," including some of the pollsters themselves. Other presidents were hardly less guilty of using polls for political purposes, of course, but Eisinger seems less critical of other presidents who have relied heavily on their private pollsters. Indeed, Eisinger defends Clinton against charges by Dick Morris and others that he not...