Classical Canons in Rhetoric
Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Blair, Ridolfo and DeVoss
The five classical canons are invention (thinking of what to say), arrangement (saying it in the order you want to), style (saying it in the way you want to), memory (memorizing it), and delivery (conveying it to the audience).
Plato
Plato makes his views on memory clear in the Phaedrus. Memory is the most important facility to exercise. Delivering a speech from memory to an audience show more skill than writing one and reading it to them. Such delivery is boring, whereas the delivery of a memorized speech can be more exciting and dynamic because the orator is able to improvise more freely. Plato is against writing because he says it cripples memory.
Aristotle
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle only focuses on three canons: invention, arrangement, and style. For invention, he offers the general and special lines of argument (such as questions of conduct), five matters on which everyone debates (such as ways and means), the common topics (example, enthymeme, and maxim), and the 28 lines of proof (such as defining your terms) as resources from which an orator may draw in order to determine what to say. Aristotle also determines four parts for arrangement: introduction, thesis, proof, and conclusion; since the audience is the primary target of the oratory, they should be the deciding factor in how best to arrange those four parts to mirror their thought process. Finally, Aristotle argues that good style should be clear and appropriate; thus, its foundation is correctness.
Cicero
For Cicero, style is amplification: saying the same thing in 2-3 different ways by adding to, elaborating, or qualifying clauses. Delivery is also important. Cicero talks about how the orator must sound and move naturally while speaking, and not exaggerate his tone and/or body movements. They must train like the best actors in order to master using their body while speaking in a way that does not seem rehearsed or robotic.
Augustine
For Augustine, invention is not important because God will tell the preacher what to say. Style should be clear so that the congregation will be able to understand him. Memory and delivery are also important: the preacher should not read a pre-written sermon, but should instead trust that God will give him the right words to say at the right moment.
Blair
Blair also largely ignores invention, claiming that genius is far more important: in other words, writers and orators do not invent new ideas, but learn to manage them; therefore, they need the intelligence to be able to do so, not the ability to come up with new topics on which to write or speak. Blair argues that good style has perspicuity and ornament: it requires purity, propriety, and precision, which means words that belong to our language, selecting pure words, and distinctiveness and accuracy.
Ridolfo and DeVoss
With the prominence of writing over oratory, the canons of memory and delivery fell by the wayside because fewer people were orally presenting their rhetorical artifacts. However, with the rise of digital technologies (part of what Ong refers to as a period of secondary orality), the need for attention to delivery becomes apparent again (some refer to memory as the ability for our computers to store our compositions, but that seems to me like a pretty lame way to re-include memory). Ridolfo and DeVoss argue in “Composition for Recomposition” that because digital artifacts are often used as part(s) of new compositions, it is important for composers to consider their audience and how they may receive the composition; then they must consider how best to compose their artifact in order to have the intended impact (in in order to be potentially useful to those audience members who decide to take elements of composition and use them in their own artifacts in a process that Alexander Reid refers to as “Rip. Mix. Burn.”). Thus, delivery carries many of the same implications it always has, but in the digital realm it necessarily includes some new aspects, such as deciding where or if to place a video, image, sound clip, or other artifact that can be used in composition.
How I would answer a question on this theme
[This could also be an answer to an Aristotle’s Time Machine question]
I would spend the majority of the time tracing delivery through history, perhaps briefly touching on the other canons. Delivery has undergone the most interesting change from being a main part of the oral rhetorical tradition, to disappearing when writing came to the fore (because delivery mostly meant 12pt, Times New Roman font, on 8 ½ x 11 paper), to completely changing with the introduction of digital rhetoric. I briefly mentioned Reid above, but I could draw on him and Yancey as well as Ridolfo and DeVoss for a fruitful discussion of delivery in new media.
Exam. Play. 