Public
Speaking Home PagePublic
Speaking Home Page
The
Basic Course
Here are some websites related to public speaking and the field of speech communication, as well as some links to electronic archives of public speech texts.
This page includes:
The Virtual Presentation Assistant from the University of Kansas. This site has many helpful pages, including one that helps the user come up with speech topics -- you can choose a general category and you get linked to a Yahoo search that will get you thinking of topic ideas in that category. http://www.ukans.edu/cwis/units/coms2/vpa/vpa.htm.
Links to Speeches and Speech Collections has an incredible number of links, some of which are more useful (and workable!) than others. Nevertheless, it could be a decent starting point to use if you want to search for texts or sound files of public speeches, both contemporary and historical, both national and international. http://speeches.com/historic.htm
The Presidential Speech Archive, a decent collection of texts of presidential speeches, is maintained by Texas A&M Center for Presidential Studies. http://scom.tamu.edu/pres/archive.html
The Douglas Archives of American Public Address, a large electronic collection of American oratory and related documents, is maintained by the program in American rhetorical history at Northwestern University. At this well-organized site, you can search for texts by speaker, by title, by controversy/movement, or chronologically. http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/
The Historical Speeches Archive contains real audio files of speeches. The collection does not seem to be very large, but it does contain several files of speeches from the civil rights era. It also contains humorous sound bytes, such as excerpts from Nixon's "I'm not a crook" speech, as well as access to a sound file of George Bush expounding on the crucial topic of broccoli. http://www.webcorp.com/sounds/index.htm
The American Communication Association, a professional organization for practitioners in the field of communication studies, has a site that contains a vast library of electronic texts. This archive includes collections related to public speaking, such as one titled "Rhetoric and Public Address." http://cavern.uark.edu/comminfo/www/ACA.html
The International Communication Association is an academic organization that focuses on many areas of communication studies, including media studies and speech communication. http://www.io.com/~icahdq/ica/ica.html
The National Communication Association, which was called the Speech Communication Association until 21 March, 1997, is the most prominent scholarly organization in the field of Speech Communication. It publishes several prominent journals, including Communication Monographs, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and Quarterly Journal of Speech, and holds a yearly conference. http://www.scassn.org/
The Eastern Communication Association is a regional scholarly organization and publisher of the journal Communication Quarterly. http://www.as.wvu.edu/~sbb/eca.htm
The Southern States Communication Association is a regional scholarly organization that publishes The Southern Communication Journal. http://ssca.net/
The Western States Communication Association is a regional scholarly organization. http://www.csufresno.edu/speechcomm/wsca.htm
The National Debate Tournament Director has a site that "is dedicated to disseminating information about National Debate Tournament format debate and the upcoming 1997 NDT" http://www.ukans.edu/cwis/units/coms2/ndt/
Public
Speaking Home Page