This study explores how truth-default theory (TDT) and relevance theory apply to public speaking and business communication. Two hundred eight college students watched one of four speech introductions varying by topic relevance and the presence of an explicit credibility statement. Participants rated speaker trustworthiness and credibility. Results showed that topic relevance had a greater influence on audience perceptions than explicit credibility statements. Highly relevant topics reduced suspicion and supported TDT’s claim that deception detection requires a trigger. These findings illustrate how speakers can build credibility and how audiences evaluate messages in educational and business public speaking contexts.

Public speaking is often conceptualized as a one-way monologue performed by a speaker for a listening audience. This monologic approach faces challenges and limited results as demonstrated by the education literature on active learning. In response to this research, this practitioner article explores the nature and effective execution of five universal Audience Engagement Techniques that provide opportunities for a speaker to turn their passively listening audience into active participants in a dialogue. Practical and theoretical implications of Audience Engagement Techniques generally are also discussed.

Effective Q&A management in team presentations is a crucial yet often neglected aspect in academic discourse. Building upon Usera and Fuller’s previous work, this article explores the intricacies of Q&A management for teams. It outlines three key challenges teams face in managing Q&A, introduces two common components (isolated and embedded Q&A) with strategic insights, and proposes techniques for anticipating and responding to questions. By aligning Q&A strategies with the five team presentation formats identified by Usera and Fuller, this article offers a comprehensive framework for enhancing team presentations, with implications for educators, practitioners, and researchers in public speaking.

Students process information in two modes: cognitive and experiential. Case studies and stories are generally used as tools for experiential information processing. This article uses memes as an instructional tool to deliver information for experiential information processing in a public speaking course. The effectiveness of memes as an instructional tool is assessed through a questionnaire in terms of their overall effectiveness and its memorability, concreteness, and course orientation. The findings suggest that memes can be used effectively as instructional tools like stories to make the students understand, discuss, and engage with course content.

Digital communication and digital oratory have become an integral part of today’s workplace. This research discusses an innovative assessment tool that uses digital oratory and digital video along with YouTube to create opportunities for the students to develop self-efficacy in digital oratory and public speaking. The measurement of the effectiveness through a survey questionnaire displays that the assessment tool met its learning objectives. The assessment tool fostered self-efficacy in digital oratory and improved digital communication knowledge and skills. The article also discusses the challenges and recommendations for implementing this assessment tool in various contexts.

Communication apprehension can lead to professional challenges for individuals, teams, and organizations. This is the first study of communication apprehension that involved a randomized national survey of working adults in the United States and captured broad representation in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, managerial status, and other factors. The study showed that communication apprehension is common, including in group discussions, meetings, interpersonal situations, and public speaking. It is significantly more common among early-career professionals, women, introverted professionals, and professionals with anxiety. Interpersonal situations appear to be the situations in which contemporary professionals are most likely to experience high communication apprehension. This study suggests more attention is needed to address communication apprehension in interpersonal and group situations. It also frames communication apprehension as a matter of inclusion and team performance.

Data from a survey of 864 executives and managers with hiring authority suggest that business communication has external legitimacy regardless of program sponsorship and that hiring managers favor courses that comprise the business communication curriculum, such as public speaking, leadership, business management, and interpersonal communication. Findings from the study can give students guidance when selecting coursework electives and writing résumés, guide faculty in making curricular and advertising decisions, and support the legitimacy of the business communication curriculum.