How We Talk About How We Talk: Communication Theory in the Public Interest

This article is a revision of the author's presidential address to the 54th annual conference of the International Communication Association, presented May 29, 2004, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Using recent public discourse on talk and drugs as an example, it reflects on our culture's preoccupation with communication and the pervasiveness of metadiscourse (talk about talk for practical purposes) in private, public, and academic discourses. It argues that communication theory can be used to describe and analyze the common vocabularies of public metadiscourse, critique assumptions about communication embedded in those vocabularies, and contribute useful new ways of talking about talk in the public interest.