Praxis Speech & Theatre common mistakes
Praxis Speech & Theatre · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Treating the speech section as a public-speaking self-assessment and answering from personal performance habits rather than from rhetorical theory and communication research.
Candidates who have competed in speech or debate trust intuition and skip the vocabulary of the discipline (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, memory; transactional model; cognitive dissonance in persuasion).
What to do instead
Build a one-page glossary of rhetorical canons, Aristotle's appeals, and the transactional communication model, and force yourself to justify each answer with a named concept before selecting it.
Confusing the three Aristotelian appeals or labeling any emotional example as ethos, or any credibility example as pathos.
Everyday usage blurs 'ethical' with 'credible', so candidates map ethos onto morality and misread speaker-credibility items.
What to do instead
Memorize ethos = speaker credibility/character, pathos = audience emotion, logos = logical proof, and practice sorting ten short scenarios into the three categories until it is automatic.
Mixing up speech-organizational patterns (chronological, spatial, cause-effect, problem-solution, topical, Monroe's motivated sequence) when the stem describes a specific topic.
Patterns overlap in real speeches, so candidates pick the pattern that sounds sophisticated rather than the one the topic's logic demands.
What to do instead
Drill with a rule: match the pattern to the relationship between main points (time, place, causality, problem/solution, categories), and learn Monroe's five steps as a fixed sequence.
Misidentifying fallacies or propaganda devices, especially conflating ad hominem with genetic fallacy, or bandwagon with testimonial.
Fallacies are taught superficially and share surface features (both attack a person; both invoke others), so candidates pattern-match on keywords.
What to do instead
Write a contrast table pairing the commonly confused fallacies with one distinguishing question for each, then classify a set of unfamiliar examples without relying on the fallacy's name.
Answering listening and audience-analysis items with folk psychology instead of the standard stage models and demographic/psychographic distinctions.
Listening appears intuitive, so candidates skip studying the stages (receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, responding) and types (critical, empathic, appreciative, comprehensive).
What to do instead
Memorize the listening stages and types plus the difference between demographic and situational audience analysis, and test yourself with scenario stems that hinge on which stage or type is described.
Treating theatre history as a list of playwrights and dates and missing the staging conventions and performance conditions of each era.
Survey courses emphasize names and titles, so candidates memorize chronology but cannot answer items about Greek masks and the skene, commedia dell'arte lazzi, or Elizabethan daylight staging.
What to do instead
Build era cards with four fields each: performance space, acting style, audience composition, and one representative convention, and quiz yourself on conventions rather than dates.
Confusing the roles and hierarchy of the production team (producer, director, stage manager, technical director, designers) in scenario questions.
Roles overlap on real productions, and candidates answer by who 'seems in charge' rather than by formal responsibility.
What to do instead
Memorize a responsibility map: producer = financing and business, director = unifying artistic vision, stage manager = rehearsal and performance logistics, technical director = executing the design technically, and apply it to each scenario.
Muddling stage geography and blocking notation, such as upstage/downstage, stage right/left from the actor's perspective, or abbreviations like X, CS, and DR.
Candidates learn these casually and reverse them because they reason from the audience's point of view.
What to do instead
Anchor everything to the actor facing the audience: upstage is away from the audience, stage right is the actor's right; practice translating ten blocking notations into plain descriptions.
Confusing dramatic structure and genre terms such as climax versus crisis, denouement versus exposition, or farce versus comedy of manners.
Definitions in textbooks vary slightly, so candidates rely on fuzzy recollection and choose the most familiar-sounding term.
What to do instead
Fix one authoritative definition set for Freytag's pyramid and for genre markers (farce = improbable situations and physical humor; comedy of manners = satirizing social class and wit), and apply them to unfamiliar plot summaries.
Answering theatre-education and directing-process items (improvisation rules, Stanislavski versus Brecht, blocking versus picturization) from general impressions rather than named methods.
These topics sit at the intersection of pedagogy and theory, so candidates who know performance but not method names guess by association.
What to do instead
Create a methods chart pairing each practitioner or technique with its core principle and one classroom application, and rehearse distinguishing directing vocabulary (blocking, composition, picturization, pacing) with concrete examples.