26.1.1: Public Speaking As Advocacy

Learning Objectives

• Define public speaking
• Outline public speaking as a form of advocacy
• Introduction to communication as constitutive, cultural, and contextual

Imagine your favorite public speaker. When Meggie (one of your authors) imagines a memorable speaker, she often thinks of her high school English teacher, Mrs. Permeswaran. You may be skeptical of her choice, but Mrs. Permeswaran captured the students’ attention daily. How? By providing information through stories and examples that felt relatable, reasonable, and relevant. Even with a room of students, Meggie often felt that the English teacher was just talking to her. Students worked hard, too, to listen, using note-taking and subtle nods (or confused eyebrows) to communicate that they cared about what was being said.

Now imagine your favorite public speaker. Who comes to mind? A famous comedian like Jen Kirkman? 

Laverne Cox speaking at the Missouri Theatre

Activist like Laverne Cox? Perhaps you picture Barack Obama. What makes them memorable for you? Were they funny? Relatable? Dynamic? Confident? Try to think beyond what they said to how they made you feel. What they said certainly matters, but we are often less inclined to remember the what without a powerful how— how they delivered their message; how their performance implicated us or called us in; how they made us feel or how they asked us to think or act differently.

In this chapter, we provide an introduction to public speaking by exploring what it is and why it’s impactful as a communication process. Specifically, we invite you to consider public speaking as a type of advocacy. When you select information to share with others, you are advocating for the necessity of that information to be heard. You are calling on the audience and calling them in to listen to your perspective. Even the English teacher above was advocating that sentence structure and proper writing were important ideas to integrate. She was a trusted speaker, too, given her credibility.

Before we continue our conversation around advocacy, let’s first start with a brief definition of public speaking.

What’s Public Speaking?

In the opening section of this chapter, we asked that you imagine your favorite public speaker, but what qualifies? How do we know when public speaking is happening? This section will briefly define public speaking to provide some working terminology and background information.

In public speaking, a speaker attempts to move an audience by advocating for a purposeful message—through informing, persuading, or entertaining—in a particular context. In almost all cases, the speaker is the focus of attention for a specific amount of time. There may be some back-and-forth interaction, such as questions and answers with the audience, but the speaker usually holds the responsibility to direct that interaction either during or after the prepared speech has concluded. As the focus, speakers deliver sound arguments in a well-organized manner. Historically, public speaking was a face-to-face process, but public speaking can now be delivered and viewed digitally.

Broken down, public speaking includes these basic components:

• The sharing of a well-organized, well-supported, message from a designated speaker to an audience;
• In a context;
• Generally prepared;
• With purpose ranging from informative to persuasive to entertaining.

A speaker often feels strongly that the audience would benefit from the message presented. After all, public speaking is purposeful, so giving a speech is the process of providing a group of people with information that is useful and relevant. It may sound like a simple process, but it requires keen delivery – including attention to verbal and nonverbal skills – argument creation, research, and rehearsal to create a captivating experience for your audience. Public speaking is more than a message, it’s an experience.

Brené Brown is one speaker that creates an experience for her audience. You may be familiar with her TedTalk, “The Power of Vulnerability” from 2014 (she’s done some great stuff since then, too). She created a captivating experience with research around vulnerability, told stories that were intriguing, and used humor to draw the audience in —she advocated for ideas that were made meaningful to and for her audience.

We could, conversely, ask you to imagine a less-captivating public speaker. Sadly, we have these in our minds, too. These are often speakers who didn’t deliver information that you were compelled to listen to: they didn’t advocate that the information was of importance to you, to your community, or to other communities. Perhaps they gave you information that you already knew or had been disproven. Put simply: they didn’t create a meaningful experience.

What you advocate for and how you deliver your message are crucial to creating a captivating experience for your audience. Tracing public speaking back to its roots will underscore the historical relevance of public speaking as a form of advocacy.

Public Speaking as Advocacy

Public speaking as a form of advocacy can be traced through the history of oral communication. Public speaking, or “rhetoric” as it was originally called, has long been considered a method in Western culture of building community, facilitating self-governance, sharing important ideas, and creating policies. In fact, these are the reasons the ancient Athenian Greeks emphasized that all citizens should be educated in rhetoric: so that they could take part in civil society. Rhetoric was a means to discuss and advocate civically with other citizens and community members.

Public speaking is still seen as a key form of civic engagement. Being a good civil servant means listening to information that’s relevant to your community/communities and using public outlets—voting, petitioning, or speaking— to participate in democracy. Public speaking becomes a necessary outlet to advocate for issues within and for your community – it’s a way to become civically engaged.

Public speaking can and should remain invested in advocacy, but “advocacy” can sound slightly intimidating.

To clarify, think about advocacy as one or more of the following components:

• Advocacy is the promotion of an idea, cause, concept, or information
• Advocacy includes actions toward a specific goal
• Advocacy finds solutions to current problems

To advocate is to say “this idea matters” and “I invite each of us to think more deeply about this information.” This could happen by discussing an idea that you believe a community needs to hear or by overtly asking audiences to change their mind about a controversial topic. When you make a selection to provide a perspective, you are actively supporting (or advocating for) that perspective. Of all the arguments, topics, or insights in the world, you have selected one – you’ve selected an advocacy.

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 Exploring Advocacy 

You may be wondering, “if advocacy means the promotion of a cause that affects communities, how do I figure out a cause I find worthy to speak about?”

Believe us, you’ve done this before.

When is the last time you advocated for a certain perspective? You may have shared an article online that suggested boycotting a musical artist. Perhaps you backed your sister up in an argument with your parents about curfews. You may be thinking about arguing with a friend to boycott fast food chains or asking an important question through social media. These are forms of advocacy. You become passionate about these topics and they motivate your engagement around these issues.

Public speaking asks that you expand those moments beyond interpersonal or social media exchanges to include a broader audience where you’re the designated speaker.

You might, for example, be asked to represent a student organization on campus. You would be responsible for advocating on behalf of that group – a responsibility that can be exhilarating and meaningful. You care about the organization –its mission, ideas, and people in it—so you want to successfully advocate for the group’s ideas.

When we advocate, we are balancing our own individual interests with the interests or goals of a larger community or group. We can sometimes over-rely on the first half: our own interests, and forget about the latter: the interests of the larger community. Oftentimes, what we advocate for or about can impact others – both directly (like your student organization) and indirectly (like language choices that are used).

Therefore, advocating for ideas through public speaking has personal and social functions. Public speaking as advocacy will guide our approach through this book, and we encourage you to begin considering your areas of advocacy. There is a lot at stake when we advocate, so we must strive to be ethical communicators.

Communicating Ethically

Ethics is the practice of what’s right, virtuous, or good (Tompkins, 2011, p. 3). You could likely list a few key ethics that you personally hold. You may view violence as unethical, for example. Ethics are also understood and defined in our own communities. Colleges view plagiarism—or representing someone else’s work as our own—as unethical and wrong within the university community (we’ll discuss this in later chapters). As public speakers, ethics is central because you are attempting to influence others.

When preparing for a public speech, there are two key communication ethics questions to consider:

First, am I advocating for information and others in ethical ways? Anytime we communicate, including public speaking, the content should be crafted with truthful and honest information. Ethical advocacy might include:

• Presenting sound and truthful information while providing credit to external sources
• Avoiding defamatory speech, or a false statement of fact to damage a person’s character
• Avoiding hate speech or language directed against someone or a community’s nationality, race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion or citizenship. Avoiding demagoguery, or actions that attempt to manipulate by distorting an audience through prejudice and emotion.

Second, am I representing myself in ethical ways? Am I misrepresenting myself? When you ask an individual or a larger audience to listen, you’re asking them to trust not just what you say, but trust who you are. You are establishing credibility—or ethos. Attempts to establish ethical ethos might include:

• Showing character by, in word and action, demonstrating honesty and integrity.
• Being prepared.
• Avoiding misrepresentations of your experience, expertise, or authority.

If we advocate for ideas with reckless disregard for truth, we are communicating in unethical ways. Instead, we can work to become ethical public speakers that communicate information and present ourselves honestly and transparently.

In addition to ethics, there are three additional principles of communication that are central to a deeper understanding of the communication process and, thus, public speaking. We construct public speeches through communication. Below, we’ll outline 3 major considerations about communication that will influence our understanding of ethical public speaking and advocacy: human communication is constitutive, contextual, and cultural.

Communication is Constitutive, Contextual, and Cultural

Communication is the basis of human interaction because we use communication to create shared meaning. We negotiate this meaning through symbols – a word, icon, gesture, picture, object, etc.—that stand in for and represent a thing or experience. “Dog” is a symbol that represents adorable pets. When you see the symbol “dog,” you might picture your own dog, so that symbol has an additional layer of meaning for you. “Dog” also often represents pets as friends (or “humans’ best friend!”), so symbols can refer to literal objects or larger ideals and norms – it’s what makes communication both fascinating and, at times, complex.

Consider the following: your friend comes over to vent about a current relationship. “I am so annoyed!” they claim. “Charlie really needs to work on her communication skills. She never calls me back.”

At first, it may seem that Charlie’s lacking in communication by not returning phone calls. However, communication isn’t secluded to verbal feedback, and it still occurs in our nonverbal symbols, in silence, or in emojis . So, Charlie’s still communicating, just not a meaning that your friend is receiving happily.

As this example begins to demonstrate, communication (and, thus, public speaking) is complex, and below we highlight 3 important components of communication, beginning with communication as constitutive.

Constitutive

When we (your authors) were new public speakers, we often failed to take seriously the opportunity of speaking and communicating with others. We would commonly use words or phrases without investigating their impact on audiences or considering what they represented. That’s because we falsely viewed ourselves as vessels that transmitted information rather than active creators in our own and other’ worldview.

We now know, however, that communication is constitutive, meaning that communication creates meaning and, thus, reality (Nicotera, 2009). Rather than merely transmit pre-determined information, what you say matters and makes up our social world. Think back to the example with your friend and Charlie: Charlie’s communication was affecting your friend and their perception of Charlie. It affected your friend’s world and relationship with Charlie in real ways.

This principle is true of public speaking, too. The message that you create in your speech matters, because it both extends others’ information (like research) and constructs its own meaning. As communicators and public speakers, realizing that you are creating shared meaning may feel like added responsibility. And it is. It means that we are all responsible in thinking deeply about what we decide to speak about and how we decide to represent those ideas.

Power is thus a core consideration of communication because when we communicate, we are influencing others and selecting certain ways to represent our ideas. When you speak, you are elevating certain perspectives, and those often lead to the empowerment or disempowerment of people, places, things or ideas. Communicating is never neutral because meaning is always being negotiated. When you were a child, for example, a guardian may have looked at you angrily, and you knew to behave or there would be consequences. You are being nonverbally influenced and creating shared meaning with that guardian.

Key Takeaway

Communication is never neutral because meaning is always being negotiated.

Recent debates around school and sports’ mascots help demonstrate the role of power in communication. Maine, for example, unanimously banned Indigenous mascots in public schools after tribal communities expressed discomfort in the images (Hauser, 2019). For Indigenous communities, the verbal and visual images were disrespectful representations of their culture – it was communication that created problematic and stereotypical narratives that represented Indigenous cultures is disempowering ways.

Meaning is being constituted (or created) when you’re in the audience, too. Because public speaking is an experience in a particular context, audience members also contribute to the meaning being shared. Consider these

Audience’s play a key role in public speaking events

three scenarios (some of which you may have experienced). While someone is giving a formal speech:

• 3 front-row audience members are sleeping;
• 3 front-row audience members are providing positive, nonverbal feedback and taking notes;
• Someone is vacuuming loudly outside the room during the presentation.

These may sound familiar, and you may even experience these in class! Each scenario, however, does not communicate the same thing and all 3 will affect the public speaking experience – for the speaker and other audience members.

As humans, we are constantly communicating to make meaning with others. Viewing communication as constitutive highlights how these acts create our worldviews, not merely reflect them. In public speaking, then, our advocacies are not just recreating information, but our speeches are active contributors to the world we live in. Our worlds, though, are never universal, and communication is also always contextual.

Information Literacy Pro-Tip: In addition to creating meaning, you will also create original scholarship. You are likely familiar, for example, with citing prominent writers, speakers, or scholars when trying to support an idea in an essay. When you begin giving speeches, you are creating citable information, and your original insights are your own.

Contextual

Like we’ve mentioned, communication is humans trying to make meaning together. As you’ve experienced, though, that meaning is not received or understood the same all of the time. That’s because communication is contextual. It happens in a particular time and place.

Pretend, for example, that you want to break up with your partner. Communicating that desire over text message is a different context then a coffee shop or in a private apartment. As this example demonstrates, context refers to a specific time and place – the literal context. You may decide that a private apartment is more fitting because a coffee shop may lend itself to external noise, changing the vibe, and disrupting your serious talk.

For public speaking, the time and place are similarly key considerations because that context will inform what you say, why, and for how long. Ask yourself,

• Where will I be speaking? To whom?
• What is the purpose?
• When is it taking place?
• Am I delivering the message through a live or mediated channel?

The literal context can have substantial implications for what and how you’re able to communicate. For a public speaker, the place and space will dictate your movement, your presentation aids, and/or the length of your speech. Chapter 2 will highlight how and why audiences must be considered, too.

In addition to the literal context – the time and place – communication occurs within larger dialogues and contexts – historical and cultural. We’ll discuss communication as cultural below and Chapter two will dive deeper into analyzing your speaking context, but let’s work to understand the larger context here, too.

A communication act – like a speech or interpersonal exchange – occurs in a particular historical context. Have you ever been to a family function where you didn’t know that 2 family members were feuding? Perhaps you loudly commented on their behavior jokingly, making the room silent and awkward. Unfortunately, you weren’t aware of the larger context.

In the U.S., major conversations are occurring at state and federal levels to address climate change. These conversations may be occurring in your communities, too. If you were discussing or speaking about climate change, being aware of these conversations would situate you to enter the larger context. Are you up-to-date on the scientific findings? Is your community susceptible to certain climate change impacts? What about other communities?

As a communicator and public speaker, being attuned and informed about the larger context is paramount, because it will direct you toward an advocacy. What’s relevant? What’s important to consider now? What references or examples are timely?

Communication occurs in a context – the literal time and place and the larger historical conversations. The final component of communication is closely connected with context, and below, we explore communication as cultural.

Cultural

Finally, all communication is cultural.

First, let’s define culture. Culture refers to the collection of language, values, beliefs, knowledge, rituals, and attitudes shared amongst a group (“Culture and Communication,” 2002). Your college campus, for example, may have certain cultural elements (like a school song) that band students together toward similar beliefs and values.

Flags are an important cultural symbol in the United States

The U.S., more broadly, has certain cultural characteristics – the 4th of July, for example, or valuing free speech. You don’t, however, just belong to one or even two cultures. We are all influenced by multiple cultural norms and values.

Communication is cultural because cultures rely on symbols – the bedrock of communication – to determine the norms, expectations, and values within the group. This means two things:

• First, culture is created through the communication process. In other words, we use communication to negotiate (and create) our cultural values;
• Second, communication reflects the cultural values and norms of the people communicating. We can often glean what cultural values are present by looking at someone’s communication.

When we communicate, we are relying on the cultural norms that we’ve been taught and, by using those symbols, advocating for those ideals.

When you are advocating for an idea and communicating why that idea matters, it’s important not to assume that your cultural perspective or location is the best or only perspective (it’s contextual, remember?!). Instead, you must be reflexive about what norms you are advocating for and how you may be representing topics or ideas from or about other cultures. Reflexivity means to critically consider how our values, assumptions, actions, and communication affect others. From a communication perspective, reflexivity acknowledges that your intentions are secondary to the impact that your verbal and nonverbal behavior has on others and on the cultural realities that you create.

Think back to Maine’s legislation that prohibits public schools from using Indigenous mascots. In the U.S., free speech is an important cultural value, so many people argue that free speech should protect these mascots and images. For Indigenous communities, however, these images don’t accurately represent their cultural ideas and negatively stereotype. Because communication does more than just reflect reality (but creates it, ahem: is constitutive), there is power in the information that’s portrayed to others. In this case, we should reflexively ask: Are the images representing our or other cultures ethically? Are we communicating in a way that disempowers others?

These questions are important because communication affects our perceptions of other cultures and cultural norms. We not only learn our own cultural values through communication, we also learn about other cultures through communication, in positive and negative ways. If you grew up in a household of University of Kansas Jayhawks, you may have heard stories about the Missouri Tigers, because the two schools have a history of feuding. This likely impacted your perception of Missouri as an institution and even students who attend their campus.

This may seem like a silly example, but it demonstrates how communication is the bedrock of cultural meaning – both our own and others.

Communication, as a process of creating shared meaning, is constituted (creating the worlds in which we live), contextual (occurs in a time and place), and cultural (shared rituals, norms, values). These three characteristics are true of all communication – interpersonal, organizational, intercultural, and digital, to name a few.

As public speakers, these components guide our decisions on what information to advocate for and to whom. They ask us to consider, what’s at stake in the perspective that I’m introducing? How will it influence my audience and my community? How am I entering a relevant conversation? What world views am I supporting and creating?

Public speaking is a privilege – not everyone, every day is given an audience of people willing to listen to their ideas. So it’s important, it matters, and it’s meaningful.

So far, we’ve discussed public speaking as a form of advocacy and identified some core communication principles to keep in mind. Next, we will discuss the actual process of communication.