American Rhetoric Frees Web Speech

O'Leary, Mick, Information Today

It's convention and campaign time--the nation's grandest and busiest occasion for speeches: nomination, acceptance, keynote, stump, etc. Most of them, of course, will be forgotten immediately upon completion, if not before. But not all: The best speeches are statements of unsurpassed historical and cultural importance. Consider King's "I Have a Dream" speech, or JFK's first inaugural ("Ask not ..."), or Churchill's stirring WWII addresses. Nor are historic speeches all historical; the most important speech of the last 10 years is probably President Bush's second State of the Union address, the "Axis of Evil" speech that presaged U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, speeches lack the bibliographical control that has organized access to books, journal articles, newspaper articles, and other content types. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that speeches are multimedia; you want to hear the speech as well as read the text. It is necessary to hear the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. or Franklin Delano Roosevelt to understand fully the profound effect …

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Publication information: Article title: American Rhetoric Frees Web Speech. Contributors: O'Leary, Mick - Author. Magazine title: Information Today. Volume: 21. Issue: 8 Publication date: September 2004. Page number: 33. © 2009 Information Today, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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