Another set of useful, theoretical elements are the five parts of Rhetorics, or “the Five Canons” of rhetoric outlined by Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician who lived around the 1st century AD. These five parts, or “canons” is something I always make room to dig into a bit in my workshops, even though I try to keep the theoretical block as brief as possible. The reason is simply that they have proven useful to most of participants over the years, and they are quite hands-on, if you know how to make them work for you.
Also – I love how this old knowledge lives on and on, and continues to affect and teach us to this day!
Very well – here we go:
The Five Parts of Rhetorics:
- Inventio – Building Your Arguments (finding or creating arguments)
- Dispositio – Organizing Your Speech (structuring arguments for an effective presentation)
- Elocutio – Dressing Your Speech in Words (choosing expressions, formulations, metaphors, etc., to make arguments as convincing as possible)
- Memoria – Committing to Memory (memorization; the art of memory)
- Actio – Your Performance (how you deliver the speech)
See these as your essential ingredients in making your master-piece of Speech. For the next posts, I will cover each one of them separately. See you there!
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