Speaking Your Mind

What are the skills required of a good speaker or member of a discussion or seminar group?
How can these skills be acquired?

Many books offer crash courses in speaking or presentation skills, but Speaking Your Mind: Oral Presentation and Seminar Skills is designed with the belief that the key to good speaking is an awareness of audience and context, and a knowledge of the techniques of argumentation or rhetoric.

The book outlines a history of rhetoric and uses this to show how knowledge of rhetoric can enable readers to argue more effectively and to be more aware of the dynamics of group discussion and dialogue. The authors also introduce the reader to the skills and techniques of making a case to a specific audience as an oral presentation. Engaging and practical activities in each chapter enable the reader to practice these developing skills in scenarios that are designed to be relevant to the world of work.

Speaking Your Mind and the three other books in the Speak-Write Series, Grammar and Writing, Writing with Style, and Making Your Case, are the result of three years of research, teaching, design and development undertaken by the nationally acclaimed Speak-Write Project. This project, funded by HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council in England) through its Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, was established to provide groundbreaking teaching materials to advance the speaking, writing and grammatical skills of first-year humanities undergraduates.

Rebecca Stott, Anna Snaith, Nigel Wheale and Simon Featherstone are Lecturers in the Department of English, Anglia Polytechnic University. Cordelia Bryan is a freelance educational consultant.