Cicero's De Oratore: the five canons
You prepare for a serious conversation with a sponsor or the dean's office the night before, and you prepare the wrong part. A tidy delivery with nothing behind it gives itself away in the first sentence.
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
Before your next serious conversation, write one page under five headings: what I am saying, in what order, in which words, what I must know without paper, how I will say it. Finish the first before you touch the last two.
The full biography is on the public version →
Marble bust by Bertel Thorvaldsen after the Roman original. Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen. PD-self (photograph); sculpture by Thorvaldsen (d. 1844), PD by age
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
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These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Judgement, Self-command
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shared competencies: Judgement, Self-command
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The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
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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