The essays and their authors are: "Speech Communication after 75 Years: Issues and Prospects" by Dennis S. Gouran; "Constituted by Agency: The Discourse and Practice of Rhetorical Criticism" by Sonja Foss; "Contemporary Developments in Rhetorical Criticism: A Consideration of the Effects of Rhetoric" by Richard A. Cherwitz and John Theobald-Osborne; "Tradition and Resurgence in Public Address Studies" by Robert S. Iltis and Stephen H. Browne; "Communication Competence" by Rebecca B. Rubin; "Interpersonal Communication Research: What Should We Know?" by Dean E. Hewes, Michael E. Roloff, Sally Planalp, and David R. Seibold; "Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies: Trends, Issues and Priorities" by Mary S. Strine, Beverly Long, and Mary Frances Hopkins; "Communication Technology and Society" by Stuart J. Kaplan; "Legal Constraints on Communication" by Peter E. Kane; "A Cultural Inquiry Concerning the Ontological and Epistemic Dimensions of Self, Other, and Context in Communication Scholarship" by H. Lloyd Goodall, Jr.; "Health Communication and Interpersonal Competence" by Gary Kreps and Jim Query, Jr.; and "What Doth the Future Hold?" by Carroll C. Arnold.

Almost everything that matters to humans is derived from and through communication. Just because people communicate every day, however, does not mean that they are communicating competently. In fact, evidence indicates that there is a substantial need for better interpersonal skills among a significant proportion of the populace. Furthermore, "dark side" experiences in everyday life abound, and features of modern society pose new challenges that make the concept of communication competence increasingly complex. The Handbook of Communication Competence brings together scholars from across the globe to examine these various facets of communication competence, including its history, its essential components, and its applications in interpersonal, group, institutional, and societal contexts. The book provides a state-of-the-art review for scholars and graduate students, as well as practitioners in counseling, developmental, health care, educational, intercultural, and human resource management contexts, illustrating that communication competence is vital to health, relationships, and all collective human endeavors.

Designed as a handbook, this text provides media, speech (public speaking, interpersonal, small group, and organizational communication), and theatre educators with both the theoretical and practical ammunition to fight the assessment battles on their campuses. The philosophical implications of accountability are balanced with concrete, specific, and usable assessment strategies. Stressing student, faculty, course, program, department, and institutional assessment, this book's aim is to provide, in one place, information that will help diverse and complex communication programs face the growing challenges in assessment. The book is divided into three sections: background and foundational information for assessment; broad assessment strategies that apply to a variety of media, "speech," and theatre courses and programs; and context-specific assessment strategies. While covering a host of topics, it: * provides an overview of assessment and suggests how it might impact communication education, * discusses the elements of program assessment and how linkage of mission statements with outcomes can lead to strong, innovative programs, * compares and contrasts regional association requirements and presents a specific how-to strategy for writing outcome statements, * discusses teaching evaluation and argues that we need to identify the "what" of teaching before we try to measure the "how," * looks at creative ways for formative and summative course evaluation that starts with the creation of an explicit syllabus, * discusses the use of capstone courses as a way of evaluating not only their major but also how students have integrated their "total" educational experience, * suggests the variety of ways that interpersonal communication can be assessed and calls for future research that stresses the "knowledge" component of learning, * reports on a strategy for developing small group communication assessment measures, and * provides media, speech, and theatre faculty and administrators with the background, understanding and tools to build stonger programs and develop better courses and educational experiences for their students.