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A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking, Fourth Edition, represents our belief in offering a truly effective speech resource that is comprehensive yet brief, affordable, and student friendly, with solid scholarship and an emphasis on the rhetorical tradition. This guide is designed to be useful in the widest possible range of situations, from the traditional speech classroom and courses across the curriculum to applications on the job and in the community.

In developing A Pocket Guide, our goal has always been to meet the needs of speech instructors who find mainstream, full-size introductory speech texts either too overwhelming or too constraining for their classes. In addition, we hope to satisfy instructors in other disciplines who want an easy and affordable tool for teaching basic presentation skills that is also manageable enough to allow them to focus on their own course material. And with this new edition, we also aim to adapt to the changing realities of technology in the discipline, both in terms of content—by providing helpful guidance on online research and online presentations—and in terms of content delivery—by offering A Pocket Guide in multiple digital formats that students can access easily on a number of devices.

Happily, A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking seems to have struck a chord. Since the first edition was published in 2003, more than 200,000 instructors and students across the academic spectrum—from courses in speech and the humanities to education, engineering, and business—have embraced the book, making it the most successful pocket-size speech text available. We have used their generous feedback to create this fourth edition.