A Speech to Entertain - A Significant But Little Taught Speech Form

James C. Skaine, University of Northern Iowa

Abstract

For years I have believed the speech to entertain to be an important type of speech. Throughout my teaching career, I have taught the speech to entertain as one of the three major speech purposes; to inform and to persuade being the other two. For most of those years I have felt that this speech purpose was much misunderstood and therefore seldom taught by colleagues at the college level. Support for this belief was supplied recently by Gibson, Kline and Gruner in their survey of the first course in speech at American colleges and universities.¹ Their results indicate that less than 12 per cent of the first courses oriented toward public speaking taught the speech to entertain; less than 5 per cent with a communications orientation taught it; and less than 14 per cent with a multiple approach devoted significant time to it. By contrast, the speech to inform and the speech to persuade both averaged around the 80 per cent level of inclusion as a topic with significant time devoted to it.² What is not answered in this study is why this speech form is taught so infrequently.

Journal Title

Iowa Communication Journal

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Recommended Citation

Skaine, James C. (1975) "A Speech to Entertain - A Significant But Little Taught Speech Form," Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 7: No. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol7/iss1/6

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