Blogora Classic: July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks

Blogora Classic:  July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks
Is this still true?  Since the publication of Joshua Gunn's textbook, I hope not...  --David

Tomorrow morning I'm off to San Francisco as part of a junket (I feel just like Tom DeLay) sponsored by a textbook publisher. About 10 teachers of public speaking are going to meet for two days in a posh hotel to be a focus group for improving textbooks.

There are a number of really good rhetoric and composition textbooks out there, reflecting the seriousness with which our English comrades take pedagogy. There is not, to put it bluntly, a single public speaking text that is worth the price. When I teach Honors Public Speaking (the only version I get to teach these days) I usually put together a packet of readings or else use Karlyn Campbell's The Rhetorical Act. What I can't figure out is why publishers think that these texts need to be so visually stimulating. I wonder if a better alternative might not be some kind of computer software, an expanded and improved version of powerpoint, that included examples and exercises for audience analysis, outlining, evidence, reasoning, and delivery--the delivery part could work like foreign language cd-roms now, with audio files of correct pronunciation.

I guess one of the reasons why these texts are so bad is that a significant number of the teachers of the basic course are graduate students who themselves lack sufficient skills in oral performance to design a unique course adapted to their university. The texts thus need to be recipe-like in order to make it easier to lecture and do assignments.

Any thoughts?