An Essential Guide to Public Speaking: Serving Your Audience with Faith, Skill, and Virtue, 2nd Edition

by Quentin J. Schultze

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2020

Overview

Communication expert and popular speaker Quentin Schultze offers a practical, accessible, and inspiring guide to public speaking, showing readers how to serve their audiences with faith, skill, and virtue. This thoroughly rewritten and expanded four-color edition has been tested and revised with input from Christian undergraduates and contains new chapters on timely topics, such as speaking for video, conducting group presentations, and engaging society civilly. A complete public speaking textbook for Christian universities, it includes helpful sidebars, tips, and appendixes. Additional resources for students and professors are available through Textbook eSources.

Key Features

• Includes helpful sidebars, tips, and appendixes
• Provides a fresh and practical handbook for creating compelling public presentations
• Frames the ability to speak as a gift, giving readers purpose and motivation to speak with wisdom

Contents

• Speak to Serve
• Plan Neighbor-Serving Speeches
• Conquer Speaking Fears
• Compose an Outline
• Speak Extemporaneously
• Anticipate Challenges and Opportunities
• Think Biblically
• Research the Topic and Audience
• Find and Evaluate Online Sources
• Be Trustworthy (Ethos 1)
• Be Virtuous (Ethos 2)
• Convey Ideas Passionately
• Speak to Inform Dramatically
• . Tell Stories (Mythos)
• Speak to Persuade Logically (Logos)
• Speak to Persuade Emotionally (Pathos)
• Share Special Moments
• Advocate for All Neighbors by Amy King
• Present in Groups by Heidi Petak
• Stage with Technology
• Speak through Video by Kathleen Sindorf
• Afterword by Clifford G. Christians
• Appendix A: Checklist for Preparing a Speech
• Appendix B: Plan Speeches with the Holy Spirit
• Appendix C: Form for Evaluating Speeches
• Appendix D: Speak from a Manuscript: Lessons from an Executive Speechwriter by Karl Payton

Praise for An Essential Guide to Public Speaking

An Essential Guide to Public Speaking is in a class of its own. It gets to the heart of the subject quickly, emphasizing skills and virtues for serving neighbors, coworkers, and the world. Schultze frames the ability to speak as a gift, giving readers the rich purpose and motivation to speak with wisdom, clarity, and delight. This book is a gem.

—Stephanie Bennett, professor of communication and media ecology and Fellow for Student Engagement, Palm Beach Atlantic University

Borrowing from Augustine, Quentin eloquently reminds us that neighbor love entails speaking for others. He draws together all the key parts of public speaking--researching, outlining, cultivating ethos, using stories, being compassionate--in a fresh and distinctly Christian way. What a gift to Christian communicators!

—Tim Muehlhoff, professor of communication, Biola University; author of Winsome Persuasion: Christian Influence in a Post-Christian World

Quentin Schultze’s Essential Guide to Public Speaking is a ‘God-send’ for instructors teaching at Christian colleges and universities. Rather than treating public speaking as performance, he urges readers to follow Jesus’s commandment to love their neighbors as themselves--to serve their audience. In a wonderful integration of faith and learning, he describes how they can do this in different speaking situations. Unlike most public speaking texts, this book isn’t boring and doesn't merely restate the obvious. Students will appreciate the warm, inviting voice of the author and the multiple contemporary examples he uses to illustrate his advice. They will also quickly realize that the guidance Schultze offers will help them to be more successful in class and with outside audiences. Instructors will appreciate the way Dr. Schultze uses rhetorical theory to undergird the guidance he gives and his emphasis on ethical considerations and speaker integrity. They may also find the organizational structure of the text a model for how they want to structure the progression of assignments in their syllabus. I cannot imagine that a communication department at a Christian school would not eagerly adopt this book. It’s an ideal fit. I have great admiration for what Dr. Schultze has created.

—Em Griffin, professor emeritus of communication, Wheaton College

Product Details

• Title: An Essential Guide to Public Speaking: Serving Your Audience with Faith, Skill, and Virtue, 2nd Edition
• Author: Quentin J. Schultze
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2020
• Logos Release Date: 2020
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• ISBNs: 9781493422449, 9781441205094, 9781540961884, 1493422448, 1441205098, 1540961885
• Resource ID: LLS:9781493422449
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-05-20T16:54:00Z

About Quentin J. Schultze

Quentin J. Schultze (PhD, University of Illinois) is a speaker, mentor, consultant, and professor of communication emeritus at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His many books include Communicate like a True Leader, An Essential Guide to Interpersonal Communication, and An Essential Guide to Public Speaking. Schultze has been quoted in major media including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, US News & World Report, the New York Times, Fortune, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He has been interviewed by CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and NPR. Visit his website at www.quentinschultze.com.