Course syllabus

Public Speaking — Syllabus

Public Speaking Free sample edition

Public Speaking is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as a specific purpose that keeps sounding like a topic, an oral citation you cannot finish, or a keyword card that still reads like a script, and reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for the night before a speech. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the introductory public-speaking course: the one-semester fundamentals course in oral communication that satisfies the oral-communication requirement in most general-education patterns. No prior speaking experience is assumed. The course treats speaking as a prepared, audience-centered, extemporaneous performance, which means a speech you plan carefully, rehearse out loud, and then deliver conversationally from brief notes rather than reading or reciting it. It is a performance course with almost no arithmetic: the weight sits on your own speeches, your rehearsals, and the honest use of evidence.

The course moves in the order a speaker prepares. It opens with how communication works, what makes a speaker honest, and why nerves are normal, then turns to the listener: how to listen well and how to read an audience. Next comes the message: narrowing a topic to a specific purpose and a central idea, finding credible evidence and citing it out loud, organizing the speech, outlining it, and choosing words a listener can follow the first time. The midterm in Week 8 is a checkpoint at the end of that message-building arc. The second half turns to the performance and the major speech types: delivery with voice and body, presentation aids, informative speaking, persuasive speaking and the three appeals, argument and the common fallacies, special-occasion and small-group speaking, and, as the close, impromptu speaking and handling audience questions.

One illustrative speech grows with you all term: a student speech, with no named speaker, about food waste in a campus dining hall. It starts as an informative speech and becomes a persuasive one, so each week you meet a familiar speech and a new move inside it. Around it, the examples come from everyday speaking situations such as a toast, a shift-change briefing, a job interview answer, a lab-group presentation, a community meeting, and campus life. You will also study verified fragments of real speeches, among them Kennedy's inaugural address, Roosevelt's address to Congress, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as models of technique only: you analyze how each one is built and how it reached its audience, never whether you agree with it. Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech is taught in words as a lesson in textual integrity, because its two published versions differ so much that the course quotes no line from it. Every move is shown on a speech, before and after, and ends in one plain sentence naming what changed and why it serves the listener.

This is a fundamentals course. It is not interpersonal or intercultural communication, not argumentation and debate, not business and professional communication, and not a survey of communication theory; those are follow-on courses it prepares you for.

A note on persuasion and contested questions

Persuasive speaking touches public questions by nature, so the course holds to one rule: it teaches how persuasion works and takes no side on any live public question. Persuasive topics come from a fixed roster of substantive, arguable, non-partisan questions at campus and community scale, such as a campus recycling program, a later library closing, a community garden on a vacant lot, a pedestrian crossing near campus, covered bike parking, or a later campus shuttle. You will practice arguing a position you do not hold, because building the strongest case for a view is a speaking skill, not a statement of belief. Fallacies are taught by definition with neutral invented examples, never with a real public figure. No grade depends on which side you take; your grade depends on stating each side accurately, supporting your claims with real evidence cited aloud, and moving an audience honestly.

A note on nerves

Nearly everyone feels nervous before speaking, and that is normal. Week 1 teaches communication apprehension (the nervousness almost everyone feels before speaking) as common and manageable, not as a diagnosis, and gives you practical strategies to try, such as rehearsing out loud and treating the rush of adrenaline as energy. Nothing in this course asks you to fill in a questionnaire about your nerves, and no one is graded on how nervous they are. Your grade rests on what you prepare and the moments you name in your rehearsals, never on how calm you look. If nerves are getting in the way of your work, talk with your instructor early; the Accessibility and Disability section below explains how to request an accommodation.

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

A way to rehearse and time yourself: a phone camera or a video-call app if you want to record, or any clock with a seconds display if you rehearse for a listener instead. See "Rehearsing, recording, and your privacy" below.
A simple outlining tool: an outline template in any document editor, for your preparation outlines.
Note cards or a few sheets of paper: for your speaking outline, the keyword cards you speak from.
Any free slide program: for the presentation aids in Weeks 10 and 11.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Rehearsing, recording, and your privacy

The course builds your speaking through rehearsal: you do a take, name one moment to fix, and do it again. You choose how to capture each take. You may record video on your own phone, record audio only, or speak with no recording at all for a trusted listener who times you and tells you one moment that changed. All three routes are equally welcome. With audio only, you leave eye contact out of your notes; with no camera, you can watch your gestures in a mirror or ask your listener about them. Any recording you make stays on your own device, and you may delete it as soon as you have written down what you noticed. You never submit, upload, or link a recording of your rehearsals, and you never share one with a chatbot: a chatbot cannot see or hear you, so you describe the moment in your own words. The evidence you hand in is what you noticed, written down.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. Speech composition and delivery — research, organize, outline, and deliver an audience-centered informative or persuasive speech extemporaneously, with a clear central idea, credible evidence cited aloud, sound reasoning, and effective vocal and physical delivery.
Outcome B. Critical listening and rhetorical analysis — listen critically and analyze a message's purpose, organization, evidence, appeals, and reasoning, explaining how it persuades and evaluating the integrity of its evidence, without confusing analysis with agreement.

The eight course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's Start Here page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

Explain how communication works using the course's six-element process model (source, message, channel, receiver, noise, feedback) traced to the linear, interactional, and transactional models, speak ethically — honestly, prepared, crediting sources aloud, never fabricating — and manage communication apprehension with evidence-based strategies.
Listen actively and critically, distinguishing hearing from listening and matching the type of listening to the situation, and analyze an audience through demographic, psychographic, and situational lenses to adapt a message's content, examples, language, and level to that audience and occasion without stereotyping.
Choose and narrow a topic, write a general purpose, a well-formed specific purpose, and a central idea, and support the speech with credible examples, statistics, and testimony that are evaluated for credibility and cited aloud in a complete oral citation naming who, what, and when — never fabricated, never plagiarized.
Organize a speech in a pattern that fits its purpose (chronological, spatial, topical, causal, problem–solution, Monroe's Motivated Sequence), build an introduction and a conclusion that do their jobs, and produce a preparation outline and a speaking outline that follow coordination, subordination, division, and parallelism and use transitions, signposts, internal previews, and internal summaries.
Use clear, vivid, and appropriate language written for a listener, including ethical and inclusive language, and deliver extemporaneously with effective vocal delivery (rate, pitch, volume, pauses, articulation, vocal variety) and physical delivery (eye contact, gestures, movement, posture, facial expression), distinguishing the four delivery methods.
Design presentation aids that serve the audience — one idea per slide, the right graph for the data, high contrast, minimal text — and integrate them with the reveal-reference-return sequence and a backup plan, without reading from the screen.
Compose and deliver an informative speech that teaches without an agenda and a persuasive speech that moves an audience ethically using the three appeals (ethos, pathos, logos), sound reasoning (inductive, deductive, causal, analogical; claim, evidence, warrant), and an awareness of the common logical fallacies, on a topic from the pinned non-partisan roster.
Speak effectively in special-occasion, small-group, and impromptu settings — fitting the occasion, brevity, and tone; playing task and maintenance roles in a group; structuring an unprepared answer with the PREP frame — and manage audience questions honestly.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through as well.

A typical week runs in this order:

Start Here. Open the week's module overview. It lists the week's items in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 40 to 45 minutes). The week's primary reading, with every speaking move shown on a speech. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a summary you submit.
Practice set (about 20 minutes). Ungraded practice with a coach, at your own pace.
Speech Workshop (about 90 minutes). The week's craft rehearsed end to end: a skill drill on the week's focus, a take you capture and check against a short rubric while naming one moment to fix, a coaching moment in which you try your chatbot's most concrete suggestion in a second take, and a check in which you catch and correct a mistake the chatbot makes about speaking.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's ideas to work on a real question and on your own speech.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 35 minutes), lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. It reviews Weeks 1 to 7 by the one distinction each topic asks for, and its one piece of new material is the five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), used as a map of the course. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, practice exam, and exam-prep tutorial.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, 5 points each. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, 10 points each, in every module except Week 8.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Speech Workshops, 50 points each, in every module except Week 8. Each is scored on a rubric that rewards the drill done, a self-assessment that names a moment rather than a feeling, coaching acted on in your own voice, and a chatbot mistake caught and corrected, never the length of your write-up or the polish of a take.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, 100 points each, in every module except Week 8. They hold the graded speeches and the building-block tasks that lead to them: the icebreaker in Week 1, the informative speech in Week 11, the persuasive speech in Week 12, the special-occasion speech in Week 14, and the impromptu speech in Week 15.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, 10 points each, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 (50 points) and the cumulative final in Week 16 (100 points).

Each week's discussion and assignment ship in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group, for the same points.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the Start Here page, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are graded and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Weekly focus, lecture page, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Focus	Lecture page	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	Introduction to Public Speaking & the Communication Process	Lecture: Introduction to Public Speaking & the Communication Process	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment (the icebreaker), quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	Listening & Audience Analysis	Lecture: Listening & Audience Analysis	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Selecting a Topic, Purpose & Thesis	Lecture: Selecting a Topic, Purpose & Thesis	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	Research & Supporting Materials	Lecture: Research & Supporting Materials	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	Organizing the Speech	Lecture: Organizing the Speech	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	Outlining	Lecture: Outlining	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	Language & Style	Lecture: Language & Style	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Delivery & the Modes of Delivery	Lecture: Delivery & the Modes of Delivery	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Presentation Aids / Visual Support	Lecture: Presentation Aids / Visual Support	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Informative Speaking	Lecture: Informative Speaking	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment (the informative speech), quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Persuasive Speaking & the Rhetorical Appeals	Lecture: Persuasive Speaking & the Rhetorical Appeals	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment (the persuasive speech), quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	Argument, Reasoning & Logical Fallacies	Lecture: Argument, Reasoning & Logical Fallacies	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	Special-Occasion & Small-Group / Team Communication	Lecture: Special-Occasion & Small-Group / Team Communication	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment (the special-occasion speech), quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	Impromptu & Adapting on the Fly / Handling Q&A	Lecture: Impromptu & Adapting on the Fly / Handling Q&A	Tutorial, Speech Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment (the impromptu speech), quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	None	Final exam	None

The midterm in Week 8 covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 4 and the language half of Objective 5 as taught in those weeks. The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on every course objective: the communication process, speaking ethics, and communication apprehension (Objective 1); listening and audience analysis (Objective 2); the topic, the purposes, the central idea, supporting material, and the oral citation (Objective 3); organizational patterns, introductions and conclusions, and outlining (Objective 4); language, style, and delivery (Objective 5); presentation aids (Objective 6); informative speaking, persuasive speaking, the appeals, reasoning, and fallacies (Objective 7); and special-occasion, small-group, and impromptu speaking with audience questions (Objective 8). Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's Start Here page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with speaking moves worked on real speeches, rehearsal, and questions. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Speech Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each speech builds on the weeks before it (you cannot outline a speech you have not organized, or deliver one you have not outlined), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips; keep to the weekly rhythm and talk to your instructor the moment a speech stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its Start Here page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's points for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a speaking course, integrity also means honest evidence and honest credit: every quotation you use is copied exactly from a real transcript and credited to its real speaker, every source and statistic is real and cited aloud with who, what, and when, a paraphrase still names its source, and a self-assessment describes a take you actually did. Three violations matter most in this course: using a quotation, source, statistic, or oral citation you did not check against the real text, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Every speech moment, message, or slide that a quiz or exam item refers to is described in text, and every rehearsal can be done with audio only or for a live listener with no camera. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a rehearsal coach, and then asks you to check its work against your own rehearsal and the real source. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You draft your own work first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the self-scored report and the conversation share link. You remain the speaker: the coach asks questions and checks your reasoning; it does not write your speech, your purpose, or your citations.
Speech Workshops (a coaching step and a required AI-critique step). You paste your outline, your keywords, or a written description of your take into your chatbot and ask for specific feedback, then try its most concrete suggestion in your next take. Then you ask it to coach, improve, source, outline, or rewrite, and catch and correct a mistake in its answer by hand, such as hollow praise that names nothing, delivery feedback that names no moment in your take, a fabricated quotation or statistic, an invented source or oral citation, a famous line credited to the wrong speaker, a rewrite that erases your voice, or an outline that breaks coordination or subordination.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can name the parts of the communication model, write a specific purpose and a central idea, complete an oral citation, tell a transition from a signpost, name an appeal or a fallacy, and classify a delivery method.

The tool drafts; the speaker judges. A chatbot can be a useful rehearsal partner and still be wrong about speaking. It praises without naming a moment, cannot watch or hear a rehearsal, invents statistics, sources, and quotations, credits famous lines to the wrong speaker, flattens a speaker's voice into boilerplate, and hands back outlines with a lone subpoint. Every quotation, source, and statistic you use must be verified against the real text, and your words stay your own. Never upload, paste, or link a recording of yourself or anyone else to a chatbot; describe the moment you noticed in words instead.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

Bring your own AI: access, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same points, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, never share a recording of your voice or face, and remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

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