Public Event Speech

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Public Speech Story
November 11, 2010
By Dalton Hammonds

A political science professor said Wednesday in front of Marshall University students that participation is a vital part of any election.
George Davis told members of his political science class to get out and participate in both mid-term and general elections.
“It’s important for younger voters to get out and vote because you guys [students] are the ones who will be choosing leaders of this country for years to come.”
Davis, who is originally from New York, told his students that there are two main types of voters, spectators and gladiators.
A spectator, Davis said, is someone who usually votes, who might follow the issues on the news, but who do very little else.
“They [spectators] don’t make phone calls for candidates, they don’t get involved in campaigns and they don’t do the things that make campaigns happen. The majority of Americans are spectators,” Davis said.
Gladiators, Davis said, are the people who are most engaged in the political process.
“These are the people make campaigns run. They go door to door and try to get you to vote for the issue or candidate that they support,” Davis said.
Davis said that other factors determined the likelihood of voter participation.
“Ethnicity, level of education and gender are things that have to be looked at when finding out how likely a registered voter will actually get out and get to the polls,” Davis said.
Davis gave reference to a George Mason University study that projected only 37% of registered voters cast their ballot last Tuesday in the general election.
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Arnold Story Revision

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November 4, 2010
By Dalton Hammonds

The doctor was in at Marshall University Tuesday.
George T. Arnold, one of the nation’s leading language experts (a doctor of language), author of a popular media textbook and retired professor of journalism at Marshall, said to 14 journalism school students good writing requires hard work.
Arnold said that any writing that journalists do has to be correctly and with proper grammar and language.
“I love coming back to Marshall,” Arnold said. “I’ve been teaching around this same round table since 1968.”
Arnold, a self-proclaimed grammarholic, encouraged the students to always fix grammar mistakes even if it upsets those around you. Arnold citied an incident he had at the West Virginia State Fair where he was angrily asked to leave a crafts stand after offering to correct the artist’s grammatical errors.
Accents were another topic that Arnold shed his wisdom on. “Don’t apologize for your accent,” he said.
Arnold released his first book, the “Media Writer’s Handbook,” in 1995 and has since released four more editions with a sixth edition expected to come out in the near future.
“There wasn’t really a good book to cover the material I was attempting to cover,” Arnold said. “I started to make handouts and soon the handouts got so thick that a publishing company wanted to know if I wanted to do a book.”
The “Media Writer’s Handbook”, published by McGraw-Hill, is used on more than 80 college and university campuses nationwide.
Arnold was a recipient of Marshall University's Marshall and Shirley Reynolds Outstanding Teacher Award and is also an inductee into the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism Hall of Fame.
Arnold retired in 2004 and relocated to South Carolina in 2008 to be closer to family.
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