Chapter 1 Summary

The freedom to speak is a fundamental value and right in a democratic culture, and one that is guaranteed in the United States by the First Amendment. As we learned from the Free Speech Movement, speech can advocate for and produce social change, but speech can also be hateful and offensive. Learning to speak competently in a variety of contexts and situations to different types of audiences will be useful to students throughout their education and career.

Public speaking, like other forms of communication, can be understood as a transactional process, in which a sender encodes a message, transmits it through a channel, and a receiver decodes the message. Anywhere along that transaction, the message can be interfered with or interrupted by different kinds of noise or distractions. Thinking about communication as a transaction also means that for public speaking, the speaker is both sender of a message (their speech) but also a receiver of messages (like the feedback of the audience). That feedback helps to develop a relationship between the speaker and the audience, which means that while speeches are certainly about content, there is more to public speaking than just the content.

In order to demonstrate communication competence, speakers must communicate both effectively and appropriately. Effective communication achieves its intended goal or purpose, while appropriate communication responds to the speaking context and audience. Communication competence can be achieved through knowledge of the rules and expectations, skill gained by practice, sensitivity to the social environment, commitment to excellence, and strong ethical standards like honesty, respect, fairness, choice, and responsibility. Honesty, as a component of ethics, also requires credit to be given to other people’s work: plagiarism—either selectively or blatantly using other’s words or images or ideas without attribution—is never inconsequential.