Summer 2025 Updates

• LearningCurve adaptive quizzing now benefits from an expanded pool of questions, ensuring that students are presented with a wider array of individualized question sets and feedback based on their correct and incorrect responses.
• The Speech Craft e-book in Achieve has been reviewed and updated to ensure that it continues to reflect the most current and inclusive guidance around public speaking, particularly around audience analysis and delivery.

Achieve features six new full-length student speech videos, including four persuasive speeches and two informative speeches. These are included both as standalone videos and as part of video activities with assessment, encouraging students to think critically about the components of a successful presentation as they view engaging examples of authentic speeches.

Achieve now includes GoReact Advanced, an upgraded version of the GoReact video assessment tool with new AI-driven features that enhance student speech practice:

• The AI Assistant provides personalized, category-specific feedback to help guide students at any stage of their speech preparation.
• Automated analytics offer insights on pacing, filler words, and pauses—helping students identify areas for improvement.
• Auto-generated, time-stamped transcripts make it easy for students to review their speech.

Winter 2024 Updates

• Empowering ethical and responsible AI usage. Three new student activities in Achieve give students a hands-on understanding of artificial intelligence, focusing on responsible, ethical usage while showcasing how AI can elevate speech assignments. These are complemented by an instructor guide packed with insights on AI's ethical implications, strategies for crafting course policies, and creative classroom activities to bring AI into the conversation.
• Building essential skills for success. Achieve includes three foundational skills activities designed to help students master the skills they need for academic and professional success, including note-taking, time management, and using a syllabus.

2nd Edition Updates (2021)

New Achieve-only modules bring students the updated advice for researching topics and speaking online. Three new Achieve reading modules, which are filled with images and video clips and backed by optional comprehension quizzes, cover some of the most needed advice in today’s public speaking classrooms.

• “Best Practices for Online Presentations in the Post-Pandemic Era” uses often humorous videos of online presentations gone awry to illustrate situations to avoid and offers advice for preventing these awkward situations, such as the best ways to set up the space and technology for speaking online and how to prevent noise interruptions and other distractions. This module also addresses best practices for engaging with others online such as when to turn the camera or microphone off and how to recover from an “oops” moment.
• “Avoiding the Dangers of Disinformation” warns students against the extreme dangers of disinformation in the digital media age and offers concrete methods for distinguishing credible from false information when researching a speech topic. With the role of the media placed in historical context, this module give students critical strategies for discernment including Gunn’s three hecks of Internet source reliability, Harris’s Internet research checklist, and other tips for avoiding conspiratorial thinking, being wary of the evidence of grievance, and making use of respected sources and authorities. 
• “Inclusive Online Speaking” provides specific strategies for being mindful of the audience when speaking online. Aided by video and screen still illustrations, this module covers topics such as providing pronouns with names on screen, focusing on the camera, using captioning, attending to the chat feature, and engaging in online question and answer sessions.

A pedagogical approach that reflects the way today’s audiences listen and students learn. Drawing on emerging research, Speech Craft recognizes how we regularly divide our attention among multiple stimuli at once.

• New advice on presentation aids helps speakers adapt to “hyper cognitive”audiences.
• Bold illustrations and photographs and an appealing design keep students engaged with the text.
• New Digital Dives activities and videos enable active learning, giving students the chance to try their hand at creating an elevator pitch, effectively lighting an online speech, identifying plagiarism, or speaking appropriately for common workplace situations.

An important new section on advocacy emphasizes how speech can make a difference. Chapter 19, Speaking for Social Change, now begins with timely examples of speaking to advocate in the civic sphere, showing how people across the political spectrum can speak up for the causes they believe in.

More support for fundamental skills of speech writing. Speech Craft provides students with more of the instructional content that helps them improve as public speakers:

• New models for organizing and outlining speeches, including  informal speaker’s notes and helpful annotations on speech outlines.
• Engaging new sample speech excerpts and videos, such as Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN climate summit and Mark Zuckerberg’s speech about freedom of expression.

Further attention to diversity and cultural inclusivity. Building on the strength of the first edition, Speech Craft 2e engages even more deeply with  the values of diversity and inclusion. The text embraces the singular “they” to avoid gender binaries, includes an updated discussion of gender and sexual identity as part of audience analysis, and represents a broader range of contemporary speakers.

Thoroughly revised and improved supplement package, including

• An innovative updated Instructor’s Manual with a new preface on how to teach the course online
• Redesigned lecture slides, based on user feedback
• An updated and expanded Test Bank
• New LearningCurve adaptive quizzes for self-practice