Prepared to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Eastern Communication Association.Benson commissioned these original essays with the idea of defining the state of the art through addressing what is worth knowing and asking about speech communication for the 1980s and 1990s. Responding to that question are: Jane Blankenship, University of Massachusetts; Arthur Bochner and Eric Eisenberg, Temple University; William Brown, Ohio State University; Herman Cohen, Pennsylvania State University; Richard Leo Enos, Carnegie-Mellon University; Gustav Friedrich, University of Oklahoma; Dennis Gouran, Indiana University; Richard Gregg, Pennsylvania State University; Diane Hope, Rochester Institute of Technology; Peter Kane, SUNY-Brockport; Michael Leff, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Diane Mader, SUNY College; Thomas Mader, Hunter College; John Patton, Louisiana State University; Barnett Pearce, University of Massachusetts; Linda Putnam and George Cheney, Purdue University; William Rawlins, Pennsylvania State University; Lawrence W. Rosenfield, Hunter College; Jill Taft-Kaufman, Central Michigan University; and Frederick Williams, Annenberg School of Communications-West."