Quintilian: the good man skilled in speaking
A club promises more in a term than it remembers. An unkept promise costs less than you think; the silence about it is what costs.
A dishonest speaker gets worse over time. He has to conceal, to blur and to remember his earlier lies — and the same people hear you every year, and they notice.
- Characterwhether what you promised first-years in September happened in November
- Long practicereading and writing, exercises like the real thing, no shaming
- Judgementthe judgement of when it is worth speaking at all
- The speech itselfthe only layer the audience sees, and it rests on the three below
List everything the club promised publicly in three months and mark each one: delivered, not delivered, quietly dropped. Every undelivered one either gets delivered within two weeks or withdrawn publicly with a reason.
The full biography is on the public version →
Early 18th-century engraving — an imagined likeness. PD-Art / PD-old-70 — Étienne Jehandier Desrochers (1668–1741)
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: Continuity, Brand and value
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Continuity
shared competencies: Continuity, Brand and value
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Brand and value
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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 — the Institutio Oratoria in English
- LacusCurtius — Book XII, where the good man skilled in speaking actually appears
- Internet Archive — a scan of Butler's Loeb translation
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