Overview
Rhetorical Public Speaking offers students and advanced approach to public speaking. It begins with Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric and progresses into a sophisticated outline of understanding, constructing, and delivering artful rhetoric, incorporating scholarship on mediated communication, pragmatic speaking genres, the rhetorical situation, and aesthetic form. Detailing some of the most powerful acts of public speaking in history, including such diverse figures as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Susan B. Anthony, Charlton Heston, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Steven Colbert, this text aims to encourage students to be engaged citizens of society. It hopes to strengthen the future of American Democracy by planting the seeds of public advocacy in students through the rhetorical skill set offered in the text.