Cicero's De Oratore: the five canons
First have something worth saying. Only then worry about how you will say it.
A pitch breaks at step one and gets repaired at step five. Cicero prepares a speech in a strict order — invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery — and before all five he demands that you know the subject itself.
- Inventio: inventionwhy the company gains anything — the answer that is usually missing
- Dispositio: arrangementin what order: what comes first, what comes last
- Elocutio: stylein which words it gets said
- Memoria: memoryso that you speak to people rather than to paper
- Pronuntiatio: deliveryvoice, pace, body — where step one usually gets repaired instead
- The situation
A sponsor pitch has been turned down for the third time, and the team is redoing the slides and rehearsing delivery again.
- What the model says
It broke at step one and is being repaired at step five: the team still has no answer to why the company gains anything.
- What you do
Before the next pitch write one sentence on what the company gets — and do not touch the slides until that sentence exists.
What it claims
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Who created it
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Why this is your problem
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Why gslk uses it
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Where it runs in the product
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Source
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The primary source is in the public domain: it may be read, quoted and reprinted freely.
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Judgement, Self-command
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Self-command
shared competencies: Judgement, Self-command
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Self-command
Of the ten gslk competency domains, this work grounds:
The same work written for a member: what to do with it in the club.
This text is freely available, so the links go straight to it rather than to a summary of it.
- Wikisource — On Oratory in English
- Project Gutenberg — Brutus and Orator, Cicero's two other books on rhetoric
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