Inviting Transformation: Presentational Speaking for a Changing World

In my experience, the worst public speaking textbook and the best are not all that different. Foss and Foss offer a genuinely fresh approach. After teaching public speaking at the college level for more than ten years, this book changed the way I teach. I have made use of this text in basic public speaking, advanced public speaking, and speech writing classes. If not for every public speaking class, the book is at least required reading for teachers of public speaking.

Finally, a public speaking text unlike all the others. Foss and Foss offer students and teachers an approach to communication that privileges values so vital to out country's multicultural landscape such as safety, value, freedom, and openness.One of the difficulties in teaching public speaking has always been the fear factor: most people are terrified to speak in public. Because "Inviting Transformation" conceptualizes the role of the speaker in partnership and community with the audience, rather than in control of them, the students see themselves working WITH an audience rather than against them. By focusing on concepts such as safety and value in a communication context, I have also discovered that this approach has helped make students more reflective of their listening and participation skills. Overall, we begin to see how all aspects of our communication can be conducive to an environment of dialogue.

Sonja and Karen Foss give a different perspective on presentational speaking. The audience is to be valued and invited to change -- just as the speaker is valued and comes to a speaking situation willing to change. This book gives us the opportunity to look at all types of communication not just public speaking. A great text for any speaking course or anyone looking to improve their presentational speaking.

I've read and taught from many different texts on public speaking. If you need or want a traditional approach to public speaking, then you have dozens from which to choose. This text takes a refreshingly different route.The authors stress the relationship between the speaker and the audience, and emphatically do NOT define communication as persuasion. Instead of focusing on the speaker's individual goals, for example, they focus on the goals that can be reached WITH the audience, thereby allowing for the possibility that all parties can be transformed through the interaction.One chapter that I've found especially beneficial is the chapter on speech designs ("Constructing Connections"). Most texts give the exact same five or six major speech designs (problem-solution; categorical; chronological; etc.) This text gives twenty. Many texts use the same speeches as examples (from Ronald Reagan, Barbara Bush, Martin Luther King...). This text uses non-traditional examples from various speaking contexts.You get the idea.Some folks will find this approach surprisingly challenging. But that, in itself, is part of its appeal to me.

I was lucky enough to recently teach two courses of public speaking using Sonja and Karen Foss' text. The book provided the guidance I needed and the framework my students needed to truly tackle and excel at the task of public, or presentational, speaking. The book's contents are the foreground to a highly evolved, and in no way excessively bulky, philosophy that promotes sensitivity to audience and to self. This philosophy is set out in a simple and straightforward manner that allows students to ease into the often intimidating process of public speaking while staying honest to their values and goals, as well as to the values and goals of their audiences. I found the book to be revolutionary in its emphasis on safety, freedom, value and openness as central to all successful presentational speaking. The book offered brief and helpful descriptions and examples, as well as helpful exercises to engage students in an experiential learning of the contents and an understanding of the authors' philosophy. The environment the book helped to foster in my classroom offered fertile ground to a diverse population of students, not only in the realm of public speaking, but also in the realm of their own personal growth and their understanding of their interpersonal communication. I highly recommend the book to any instructor or professor who is interested in challenging students and encouraging positive and aware growth while they meet those challenges.Tema Milstein, Communication and Journalism Instructor, University of New Mexico