CHAPTER: Discourse and Narrative

Oral Public Discourse Verbal expression aimed at a public audience

One thought on “Oral Public Discourse Verbal expression aimed at a public audience

  1. On formal debates, you might want to include the US Presidential Debates, both for their history and their performative element. To stay away from contemporary controversies, and example might be the first televised debate Kennedy-Nixon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYP8-oxq8ig), or for their historic importance and as examples of a totally different debate style the Lincoln-Douglas debates (https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/lincoln-douglas-debates-1858/). It might also be important to connect debates to the principles of parlamentarism, for which it is a foundational element.
    A possible item might be not spoken forms of discourse such as the scientific form of discourse by publication of papers, or online forms like discussion fora, wikis (with the associated example of wikipedia battles for control of the online record), or even the forms of discourse (civil or otherwise) practiced on social media in general, maybe incl. trolling or other forms of detraction and manipulation. Formal and IMHO fairly effective forms of this might be consultations by government agencies, standard setting processes by industry and other association (think RFCs of the IETF).
    On interviews, it might be worthwhile to distinguish push- vs. pull interviews, i. e. interviews, where the interviewers want to get what they are looking for vs. those, where the interviewee wants to push their points. Discussion could include sponsored interviews, interviews with pre-cleared questions and investigative interviews and depositions.
    Attached to the panel discussion, townhall formats might be added, where the emphasis is on the few-to-many communication between the speaker or panel and the audience, as opposed to the few-for-the-many of the panel discussion or in extremis the speech.

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