Communication Studies The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Search

Communicating in Public: 36:010

Curriculum Fit:

This is a Communication Studies practice course. Two practices in particular are typically emphasized in this course: speaking within genres and settings that are associated with public life (political, professional, etc.) and engaging in rhetorical criticism (analysis and evaluation of public communicative artifacts). Students are asked at a minimum to prepare and deliver speeches and to write critical essays. Instructors have also added participation in a ongoing public controversy or service-learning project as a component of the course.

There are no prerequisites for this course, but students taking this course can be assumed to have completed at least part of their Rhetoric Department requirements. Some may have completed the basic course in Business and Professional Communication. It would be expected that after this course, majors interested in public communication would enroll in a course sequence that would look something like this: Rhetoric and Politics, American Public Address, Public Argument, Contemporary Political Rhetoric, Introduction to Rhetorical Criticism, and Studies in Argument as well as cognate courses in media studies and interpersonal and group communication.

Textbooks:

The most commonly used text in our Department has been:

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. The Rhetorical Act. 3d ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003.

Because it has the most comfortable combination of public speaking and basic rhetorical criticism for teaching, it might be possible to combine a "speaking in public" text with a short rhetorical criticism book or with Gronbeck and Sillars' Communication Criticism.

Students are often required to purchase and read a daily newspaper, such as The New York Times. Instructors might also wish to either put public-domain texts of speeches and other rhetorical artifacts on a website or photocopy and distribute those texts and artifacts to students.

Assignments and Readings:

As a practice course, the curriculum in this class should be fairly evenly divided between lecture/discussion sessions and practice sessions. The reading load should be moderate, and oriented toward reinforcing lecture content and preparing students for in-class and homework exercises. Attached to this sheet is a sample tentative schedule.

Grading Policy:

Students in this practice course will be evaluated primarily on their oral and written performances. Attached to this sheet is a sample grading scale for the assignments and readings schedule.