TRANSFORMATIONAL SPEECH
No more than eight 3×5”notecards, one side only. No full sentences; keywords or key phrases only, except for quotes.
- Introduction: With this speech you are going to break through a college audience’s entrenched belief system about a vibrant public controversy and attempt to reconfigure common sense (the sensus communis). Your introduction will model your own or someone else’s transformative experience around your topic, tapping ethos/pathos/logos to pave the way for your argument. The claim that ends your introduction will state the nature of the paradigm shift which you want to encourage in your audience’s belief system.
- Body Strategy: To effect transformation you will need to find the “straw to break the camel’s back” of their belief system. Because an ideology is a network of values, beliefs, and opinions based on a system of representations, you want to undermine the weakest link in the current representational system so that you can then reconfigure it.
o (Body Part A) The first part of your Body is explanatory; it will name and analyze the “ideonode” (value representation) that underpins the entire system, and say how that “ideoplex” (system of values) depends on its legitimacy.
o (Body Part B) In the second part of your Body you will undermine that link in the chain with a critical act that will swap out or repurpose that ideonode.** In doing so, you will need to describe the new configuration that results and invite your audience to inhabit it.
- Peroration: The conclusion of your speech can use techniques of narrative reversal (“Imagine yourself…”,) pathetic appeals (“What would it feel like…?”), etc. to reposition your audience in this new way of seeing the world and suggest what this new configuration implies about how we should/can live and act in that world.
Additional Requirements:
- At the discretion of the instructor, a time penalty will be assessed on speeches under 5 or over 7 minutes. Aim for 6 minutes as carefully as possible.
- Extemp is a threshold requirement.
- Your speech should show increasing mastery of the rhetorical tools of eloquence.
- Your delivery should expand on the standard competencies in developing pathos and ethos (expressiveness, persuasiveness or conviction of tone, color, rhythm.)
- You should demonstrate progress in develop a relationship with your audience through your engaging presence as a pubic speaker.
- A question and answer session involving your classmates and your instructor will follow your speech.
*In smaller sections of P155 your instructor may extend your speech time.
**Cezar M. Ornatowski and Noemi Narin, “Collocutio: Transformational Speeches,”
Advances in the History of Rhetoric 11/12 (2008/2009): 231-36.