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What started out as an art evolved as a science.
Scientifically studying speech was a joke back in the early 1900s. For most academicians during that time, speech was as Aristotle and the other ancient masters intended it to be: a play of words performed before an audience. As such, speech was an art; and even as an art, it was deemed of lesser importance compared to literature, and much lesser than the empirically-grounded physical sciences.
It took a small group of speech teachers to initiate the development of speech as a reputable science. As an afterthought, some perceived the effort as more out of vindication than a drive to discover a new field; the teachers felt they deserved more respect than they were getting, and they were out to prove themselves right.
Whatever their motivations were, suffice it to say that their efforts shaped what we now call "communication research." Of course, it took a while before the academic majority embraced the idea of speech as a science. Communication research pioneers first had to point out how speech is not just a platform art, but an ongoing, interactive and ultimately inevitable process; that effective communication goes beyond the grammar-perfect stringing of properly pronounced words.
In the decades that followed, landmark events helped prove these assertions: wars, unorthodox movements, high-profile assassinations...We could only imagine how the communication research proponents must have sneered at their speech-as-an-art critics:
"To heck with formal public speeches! Yes to self-expression--make that quantifiable self-expression!"
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December 2001
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