Compton Wins Distinguished Book Award

Josh Compton, Professor of Speech, has been awarded the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from the Communication and Social Cognition Division of the National Communication Association for his book, Persuasion…

The magazine that made me: Dysfluent

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my voice. I’m a stutterer, and I’m a speech professor.

Much of my stutter is covert, from over forty years’ practice of creative ways to avoid blocks and elongations and repetitions. I glide into a quick word substitution, or I linger for a second or two of strategic silence. And as a result, I usually pass as fluent—so well, even, that I won scores of awards for public speaking and debate in college. And now I’m regularly invited to give talks about my research for academic and community events. I teach a popular public speaking course with a wait list that regularly doubles and triples the number of available seats in my class. My stutter is not obvious to most people. I sound pretty fluent, usually.

But Dysfluent—an independent magazine supported by the Irish Stammering Association and the British Stammering Association / STAMMA and created by Conor Foran and Bart Rzeznik—challenges the idea that passing as fluent is the only worthy metric for a good voice. I see this magazine as a sort of celebration of stammering, of stuttering as a different way of communicating. Its essays and interviews give space to the stuttering voice—and more than just space. A platform and a spotlight and applause.

Josh’s bio

Josh Compton is Professor of Speech at Dartmouth College. He has been studying inoculation as a way to confer resistance to influence for more than 20 years.

Inoculation theory and health: Current trends and movements

Summary: This review surveys some of the most recent findings of inoculation theory in health contexts, with special attention to applications and findings that differ in key ways…

Inoculation theory, media, and communication: Current theorizing of the inoculated news consumer

In this conceptual paper, the idea of the inoculated news consumer is revisited and expanded to consider inoculation theory and the inoculated mass communication consumer. It surveys pioneering…

Image repair of fake news: The Washington Elm in Cambridge, Massachusetts

A little over two miles from the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the site of the 115th Annual Eastern Communication Association Convention—the Washington Elm stood for decades until it…

Understanding individual differences in the dimensions of ‘vestedness’ within Midwestern populations toward the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) during early-stage pandemic onset

Mason, A. M., Compton, J., & Spencer, E. A. (2023). Understanding individual differences in the dimensions of ‘vestedness’ within Midwestern populations toward the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) during early-stage…

Surveilling the web, mobile, and language accessibility of Communication’s digital presence within institutions of higher education globally

This study aims to understand the general web accessibility of digital information networks which may serve as barriers for access to the global discipline of Communication through institutional…

Revisiting the effects of an inoculation treatment on psychological reactance: A conceptual replication and extension with self-report and psychophysiological measures

Research published by Richards and Banas and Richards et al. demonstrated that an inoculation treatment given to participants prior to their exposure to a series of freedom-threatening persuasive…

Persuasion strategies in vintage Rally Day postcards: Postal religious communication

Postcards can yield insight into persuasion strategy, religious events, and social situations. Rally Day postcards reveal how churches at the start of the 20th century characterized a pivotal…

Inoculation theory and sport communication

Inoculation theory is a classic theory of resistance to influence-an explanation for how positions can be made more resistant to future change through preexposure to weakened forms of…

The Devil and Vaccination and inoculation theory: Health communication, parody, and anti-vaccination rhetorical strategy

Here, an argument was advanced that taking a long historical view—in this case, considering satirical health messaging of the late 19th century—offered potential insight into modern health messaging,…

The analogy of/and inoculation theory to mental immunity

There’s still a lot to work out about this theory, but here’s what we’re thinking now: We gain a lot by keeping the analogy of inoculation theory in…