All of us, my writing partner and I and you, seem to have the same
perspective, that both writing and speaking are part of a larger
rhetorical process, and that both need to be taught in ways that allow
and encourage the students to develop their own voices, to understand
the constraints and challenges of social/discourse norms and
expectations, and to become fluent with the technology of choice
(writing, speaking or media; none of us will tackle music, dance or
visual arts though it could be done in principle)
The voice/presence/kairos is my (still very rough) attempt to re-orient
the speech curriculum away from the emphasis on conformity to Western
norms of analytical argument. My aim is to develop a course in
rhetorical competence that focuses on the situation of academic
speaking, but does not set those norms up as anything but the
expectations of one particular sort of audience in one particular sort
of circumstance. Obviously a writing curriculum would do the same thing
when it focuses on the rhetorical process and not on conformity to some
set of Harcourt Brace or Strunk & White rules.
The reality, of course, is that I still spend most of my time dealing
with issues of stagefright, delivery and issue analysis, just as a
writing instructor spends the bulk of instructional energy on sentence,
paragraph, and argument construction. The important thing is to frame
these as negotiated elements of voice and presence, done with a
sensitivity to the appropriateness of the moment, and not as measures of
how well a student can 'learn' the rules and techniques of public
speaking.
I don't think my views are particularly unusual or innovative, although
it is not yet possible to find a text book that supports them very well.
dale