To intervene: a transcending and reorienting goal for public speaking

ABSTRACT

This essay proposes a view of public speaking as “interventional” that incorporates and subsumes the traditional speaking goals of informative, persuasive, and invitational. Additionally, this approach to public speaking reorients attention to the fundamental process of constituting symbolic “reality” that underlies and is generated in human communication. It argues that speeches should be reconceptualized as attempted interventions in ongoing conversations that shape how participants construe needs, power, and worldview symbolically. It introduces the rhetoric of social intervention model as a framework for “entering” the rhetorical process, developing speeches that attempt to promote and hinder shifts in naming patterns, and reflecting on potential side effects and ethics of one’s own and others’ naming choices. The essay explores how a speaker would develop a speech from an RSI perspective and discusses the implications of an interventional approach to public speaking.

Acknowledgments

She thanks Dr. William R. Brown and two AJC reviewers for their critiques and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2017 Carolinas Communication Association conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.