Have you ever listened to a speech, seriously attempted to discern the speaker’s message, then realize you have forgotten most of, if not, the entire message moments after the speech is finished? Far too often audiences sit through a presentation focusing as best as they can, only to have the speaker craft a message in a way that is nearly impossible for the audience to remember. The best speakers not only deliver a memorable message, but also one that inspires their audience to action or change of mindset. Speakers at Ted Conferences are faced with a difficult challenge: they are given roughly 20 minutes to deliver a speech that is both unforgettable and inspiring. This thesis will examine how to craft speeches that are both memorable and inspiring.

A creative exploration of the consequences of public speech in the era of freely accessible, social media, as the author, a former elections official, records and explores the consequences of public dissent in the case of President Barack Obama’s eligibility controversy. This non-fiction narrative culminates with the author’s analysis and observations on both his personal experiences and the state of public speech and political power in contemporary America.

Chapter I. This is a critical study of the rhetoric of Sir Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and of plays in which they are portrayed. The purpose is to discover whether or not the rhetoric of the playwrights preserves the integrity of the ideas of the central characters as evidenced by the rhetoric found in their original works . Chapter II. Rhetorical criticism is rendering a judgment on the fitness, correctness or appropriateness of those discourses, spoken or written the aim of which is to influence the readers or hearers. There is much variety in methods of rhetorical criticism. This study will use the dramatistic pentad proposed by Kenneth Burke. Its elements are act, agent, agency, scene and purpose. It will also employ the naming of strategies, another term from Burke meaning methods or attitudes. In addition judgments will be made on the basis of significant ideas, creative choice of language, integrity and credibility. Chapter III. Sir Thomas More was a lawyer, scholar and public official in England at the time of King Henry VIII. He incurred the King’s displeasure by his refusal to support him in his efforts for a divorce. He believed strongly in the need to preserve one’s integrity by obeying his conscience. In his trial speech, his main strategies were related to the importance of conscience and his knowledge of the law. He was pronounced guilty of treason and executed. Chapter IV. In a Man for All Seasons, the playwright has used several theatrical strategies that help to focus attention on More, the central character. He is presented as a genial man of firm reliance on the law and obedience to his conscience. On the basis of a comparison of the rhetoric in the play with that of More, it is concluded that the playwright faithfully preserved the integrity of More’s ideas. Chapter V. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian, pastor and teacher of Germany during the Nazi regime. He opposed the Nazis on theological grounds, and gradually came to believe that he must become active personally and politically. He joined the resistance movement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was imprisoned and executed. His chief motive for action was obedience to God. In selected writings, he is seen to have a strong faith in God, and great hope for the future. Chapter VI. The Cup of Trembling is a play based on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though using mostly fictional names. Again, the playwright uses devices that bring out the hero’s character. His struggle against the Nazis is seen to involve a corresponding struggle within himself as he makes decisions about his role in the situation. His faith in God and obedience to God are expressed, as well as his hope for the future. On the basis of similar ideas expressed in both media, it is concluded that the playwright succeeded in preserving the integrity of Bonhoeffer’s ideas. Chapter VI I. The key idea of conscience is seen to have been preserved by both playwrights. A number of major ideas were traded from the original figure to the play, and their integrity was seen to be preserved. Therefore, it is concluded that the playwrights did preserve the integrity of the ideas of the two men in the rhetoric of their plays. The major implication of this conclusion is that drama is an effective means of expressing the rhetoric of important historical figures.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the rhetorical strategies of the Open Convention Movement, a conglomerate of political mavericks who arose during the Democratic Presidential primary campaign of 1980. It consisted of both supporters and antagonists of incumbent President Jimmy Carter, primarily because of opposition to a proposed rule which would have required delegates to the Democratic National Convention to vote, on the first ballot, for the presidential candidate whom they represented in their state-wide primaries.

The 1952 Presidential campaign ushered into national prominence the Democratic nominee, Adlai Ewing Stevenson. His sudden and dramatic emergence as an important factor in world politics was due in part to his unique oratory. Dynamic in style and content, his speeches commanded the rapt attention of the American people for three intense months during which he delivered over two hundred and fifty. Of interest and importance is the new insight into national problems that he gave to the American voter as a result of these orations. The problem is to analyze, through his public addresses before and during the 1952 campaign, the power of his oratory with respect to the enforcement of ideas, and to more fully understand his personality and philosophy.

This study proposes to analyze the qualities of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speeches as determined through a general survey of his speeches and a particular study of those of 1941. As President Roosevelt is considered an effective speaker of the day, a consideration of those qualities of composition, delivery and audience reaction which have contributed to the effectiveness of his speeches should have value. The year 1941 was selected because it was decisive year in the destiny of our country and as such affected his speeches.

This paper explores vilification in the popular counterterrorism show, Fox’s "24." A critical, in-depth analysis of three prominent antagonists from the show illustrates the different ways in which they are vilified. Each of the three characters is examined to understand which type of villain he or she embodies in "24," which of the show’s moral codes the villain affronts, and how he or she is punished or treated as a result. The analysis considers the broadcast of the show’s first six seasons in relation to neoconservative and Christian Right values that characterized the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. It finds that the show’s characterizations of all three villains—an Islamic extremist, a femme fatale, and a shirking bureaucrat—reinforce dominant xenophobic, patriarchal, and hypermasculine values, which underscored the Bush administration’s war on terror.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

In the last several years lists of theater organizations in California newspapers hare grown steadily. This writer asserts a need for study of active amateur and semiprofessional theater groups in California for gaining knowledge and understanding of cultural activities taking place about the Western United States. Such material would help students and adults interested in drama gain information where theaters remain active according to particular tastes. After receiving a list of nonprofessional theater members of American National Theatre and Academy's California regions, theater activity presented itself to be of such quantity within the state that it became necessary to make definite limitations of the research area to do justice with the planned study. The final decision was made for this survey to cover communities surrounding the University of the Pacific's Stockton campus, referred to as Central California.

The growth of interest in drama and the realization of the educational value of dramatics has developed a new place for the college theatre. Pacific Little Theatre was organized eleven years ago to fulfill a definite need and has since grown slowly and steadily into a most active producing unit, serving both school and community. Indeed Pacific Little Theatre can be taken as an excellent specific example of the contribution which can be made to campus and community life by the college aside from its main function as fundamental ground for students in the theatre arts.