I'd like to take a little bit of time and talk about rhetoric.

So my [UNKNOWN] in communication, but I identify with rhetoric. I, I, I am a rhetorician. And that's kind of why I'd like to talk to this. [INAUDIBLE] Not to just correct some false impressions, though, that, that's a good thing. But because the way in which we're going to study public speaking in this class is going to be from the rhetorical tradition. And I want to take some time just to make sure that we're all on the same page, that I've clarified definition That I've talked to, how this is going to shape our time together. Now, to begin with, rhetoric has a wide range of definitions. We've had the term for millennia, and in fact, there's compelling scholarship that indicates, Plato was the very first person to coin the term rhetoric. And rhetoric is a, something that is of key concern for Plato. Not always the biggest fan, he was, of rhetoric But in one of his works, he defines rhetoric as the art of winning the soul by discourse. Now, his student Aristotle would define rhetoric as the faculty of discovering in any particular case, the available means of persuasion. So here it's sort of an ability to see, all the possible paths one might take in crafting a speech or crafting an act of persuasion. Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician, defined rhetoric as that thing that happens, this event that occurs, when the good person speaks well. There's this nobility to it. That nobility is very much absent in John Locke's definition of rhetoric. One of the definitions of rhetoric as a powerful instrument of error and deceit. Now, a more recent definition of rhetoric comes from a modern rhetorician, by modern I mean alive. Gerard Hauser who says, rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention. So it's about being able to draw things

together, really with an eye towards decision making, influence. So, in some ways I'm going to duck this issue. I'm not going to define rhetoric, all right, or at the very least what I'm going to say is that the rhetorical tradition helps us in our study of the art of public speaking. And I choose the term art here very deliberately. There are certainly, yo, you know, lots of social scientific work that's gone into studying public speaking, but as a performance skill, I want to look at this as an art. And in that way, again, borrowing from the rhetorical tradition, we can study an art through instruction, imitation, and practice. And each one of these is different but very important. So in terms of instruction, well, we'll study principals of argumentation, arrangement, style. There's no need for you to reinvent the wheel here. There has been, so much research, scholarship thinking, on effective public speaking. That's kind of the space for this class, to be able to share a lot of that, the history of public speaking as well as the history of the research on public speaking. So there's a space for instruction. But then we also want to look at imitation. And in any sort of skill, and certainly in public speaking, we benefit by identifying and imitating some of the s, best practices of skilled speakers. And I'm not talking about stealing or plagarizing here. So it's not like taking a line and claiming it as your own, you know, so you're not sitting down like, I had a dream. Oh, that's bri, no one will guess where that came from. So I'm not talking about plagiarizing or stealing, what I'm talking about is finding someone, that you think is a good speaker and often, that is kind of, you share some traits with. And studying them, and cracking open what they're doing in their speech, so that

you can borrow some of it, or you can adapt what they're doing to your speech repertoire. So really finding good models of imitation, I think, is key to good speaking. And in fact, if you'll remember a couple of lectures ago, we talked about rhetorical situations. This is a really good way of sort of adapting to that since rhetorical situations demand so many varied responses to different genres, I want to find different models that have done that or models close to me that I can, I can look at and study. So instruction, imitation, and of course practice. This is the most obvious leg of public speaking study. You have to put in the practice, that stands to reason. You can go get all the instruction on public speaking you want, but you need to be able to adapt that, i, internalize those ideas, a, and develop your personal style that really going to help you do well in those speaking situations. And the nice thing about practice is, of course, with public speaking, you can do it almost anywhere. in, in many ways, this is the benefit of doing an online class on public speaking. I'm going to often ask you in these lectures to practice something right where you're sitting. And so if you're really nervous about public speaking, as many are, we'll talk to fear of public speaking, but if you're nervous, this gives you the opportunity to practice with no one else around. And hopefully, in getting that practice in, you can build up that confidence so you can go in front of a live audience and do even better. So, instruction, imitation, and practice. These are some of the things we inherit, from the rhetorical tradition that I think it, we're going to shape and help us in our study of public speaking. In the next lecture I want to talk about the basic steps in putting together

a presentation. The basic steps in putting together a presenation, the canons of rhetoric.