A new pedagogy for explanatory public speaking: Why arrangement should not substitute for invention

Abstract

Because of its eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century roots, current informative speaking pedagogy emphasizes arrangement rather than invention. Today's pedagogy provides speakers with a rich array of possibilities for organizing speeches but gives little systematic assistance in anticipating and overcoming audiences' likely sources of confusion. Because rhetorical forms themselves do not make complex ideas clear, this approach is inadequate. Speakers attempting to inform need heuristics or diagnostic frameworks for determining why complex material is apt to confuse. They also need tested methods for avoiding such confusions. This essay offers a new pedagogy for explanatory speaking, a type of informative speech, built around such heuristics. This pedagogy is supported by classical rhetoric's emphasis on the importance of invention or inquiry prior to presentation and by decades of contemporary educational research. In essence, this new pedagogy casts informative speaking as an explicitly strategic enterprise for which there is important traditional and recent empirical guidance.