ABSTRACT
From the 1700s to the early 1900s oral vernaculars reflected the mechanics-heavy elocutionary speaking found both in the popular manuals for home and social entertainments and in academic textbooks variously technical or expressionist. Around 1900, elocution’s text genres were giving way to books foregrounding an extemporaneous approach which, already available for adult learners in lesson systems and correspondence schools, entered speech departments under mastheads of argumentation, extemporaneous speaking, and oral interpretation. James Winans’ Public Speaking (1915) established a pedagogy current up to the present, but only after educators had sifted through failed genres of speech-reader, the “new elocution,” speech composition, oral English, and delivery-only speaking.
