ABSTRACT
During the past twenty years the critics of public address have been active in our universities. Their production has been impressive in quantity and acceptable in quality. Many of these scholarly contributions have found their way into university libraries as master’s studies or doctoral dissertations, while others appeared as articles in learned journals, or as monographs or books. The criticism of orators, to be sure, was freely practiced by Greek and Roman scholars. Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian not only formulated principles of composition and of presentation, but recorded at length their judgment of contemporary speechmakers. Intuitionism or impressionism disavows the handicaps of science. The judge of speeches like some drama critics attends as one of the audience and registers his individual reaction to what he sees and hears.
