Rhetoric Matters

Here is the COMM 401 Summer Session I Syllabus:
COMM 401 Syllabus

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A sharp eyed student (Joel Cohen) in my political advertising class took to heart one of the lessons we discuss–namely, that there are no accidents or happenstances in political ads. We discuss this concept in the context of, say, Mike Huckabee’s claim that the floating white cross behind his head in his 2007 Xmas ad [...]

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I’ve been frustrated everytime I teach speechwriting that I’ve been unable to locate a picture of Judson Welliver. I challenged my COMM 455 Speechwriting students to see if they could locate a picture of Welliver and one enterprising, diligent student (Josh Basile) found several! Here’s my favorite.

Welliver was the first official speechwriter (”literary assistant”) to [...]

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Here’s a link to my grading scale, for students in COMM 455 & COMM 458P.
http://www.comm.umd.edu/faculty/tpg/grading_scale.htm

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Politico offers a profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s “only foreign policy speechwriter.” He’s 31 and poised to be the primary author of the much-anticipated speech from the president during his upcoming trip to Cairo. Here’s another profile.

This type of article, interestingly, speaks to the hype that increasingly accompanies major speeches from Obama. There was [...]

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