Abstract

William Keith, Christian Lundberg, and James M. Farrell have thoughtfully reviewedmy effort to explicate howmodern public speaking came to be conceptualized on the basis of antecedent text genres.My argumentwas that a newunderstanding of oral rhetoric emerged between 1890 and 1930 as authors experimentally and variously appropriated concepts and frameworks from elocution (in its several iterations), from oratorical composition (as given in new-rhetoric treatises, advanced rhetorics, and composition books), and from varietal popular or professional works (of extemporaneous speaking, debating, and audienceadapted preaching). More broadly, my “Inventing Public Speaking” represents an effort to rebalance the larger history of rhetoric, 1730–1930, along the lines of orality in the context of a post-1980 emphasis upon writingcentered schoolbooks and pedagogies. Here my three colleagues usefully expand this principle of disciplinary balance by showing how the text-based conceptualizing of rhetoric may be enhanced, in Farrell’s telling, by deeper understandings of the professional and institutional roots of the modern communication discipline and, from Keith’s and Lundberg’s perspective, by historically sensitive refinements of pedagogy to promote speechmaking that is communicative, communitarian, and deliberative. But before exploring intersections betweenmy article and the commentaries of Farrell, Keith, and Lundberg, I wish to expand a bit on what I see as the Big Problem in