You should think of the oral reports for English 510 as conference papers. They should be about twenty minutes long; you should present them extemporaneously instead of reading the manuscript; you should provide handouts for the audience so that they have access to your key ideas and your sources; and you should consider using the overhead projector. You are to give a report on a composition or rhetorical theorist, and you must clear your subject with Dr. Sullivan on or before July 8.
If your subject is one of the really big names (Bakhtin, Toulmin, Burke, Habermas, Ong etc.), you will need to tell us a little something about their lives and disciplinary interests, survey their works briefly, and also present what people have said about them. In other words, you need to cover both primary and secondary sources. Good places to start looking include the bibliographies in our text books; Foss, Foss, and Trapp's Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, and Richard Johannesen Contemporary Theories of Rehtoric: Selected Readings. Some of these people have WWW pages devoted to scholarship on them. You might try a couple internet search engines to see what you can find. You might also look in the Index to Journals in Communication Studies.
If your subject is one of the more approachable figures (someone you might run into at a professional conference--Winterowd, D'Angelo, Kinneavy, Robert Connors, Andrea Lunsford, Janice Lauer, Walter Beale, Carolyn Miller, Michael Halloran, Richard Johannesen, Janet Emig, Albert Kitzhaber, Richard Young, Lee Odell, Richard Enos, etc.), you will need to say a little about their affiliation and disciplinary interests, perhaps their career moves, and their works. If it is possible to find articles that respond to, or rely on, their work, you should also introduce us to them. In other words, with these people, you will probably be working mostly with primary sources. Some of these people will have Homepages on the WWW. If you can find them, they should be excellent guides to their work. You can also find references to their works in the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, a yearbook of references to articles published in the field of composition and rhetoric.
If you would like to have your handouts considered for publication on the NIU WAC Homepage, you will need to submit disk copies, IBM format. Specify which word processing software you used, or, better yet, submit the text in an ascii file.