Classical Canons in Rhetoric

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.

Delivery in Composition Studies

Delivery in New Media

Bolter, Yancey, DeVoss and Ridolfo, Selfe, Kress, Reid

Of the five classic canons of rhetoric, two have been neglected: memory and delivery. Of late, delivery has been making a comeback. Since digital texts now make it easier than ever to be multimodal, we need to not only teach students how to write in these media but also how to present their compositions to wider audiences. Delivery used to refer only to oral demonstrations: volume of voice, modulation, of pitch, and rhythm.

David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s Remediation mark one of the first instances delivery reemerges in rhetorical theory, though it is not addressed directly. The very notion of “remediation” has implications for composition: remediation is a process whereby new media define themselves by borrowing from and refashioning old media. In this sense, the old media can never be entirely erased because traces of it are contained in the new media. An example of remediation is computer graphics borrowing from painting, photography, television, and film. This notion has implications for delivery because most remediated digital texts also have the goal of immediacy. In other words, they seek to erase the line between media and reality as much as possible; they seek to create a feeling of satisfaction of experience that can be taken as reality. As such the delivery must be such that the user/viewer/reader perceives it as reality (ie: the graphics in a virtual reality simulator must be remediated to the point where it tricks the brain into thinking it is real reality). But remediation also has effects for delivery in Comp Studies. Based on Bolter and Grusin’s logic, we might expect that writing will remediate other media, whether the writing is displayed digitally or in print. For instance, student writing could be published electronically, which would bring an added exigency to the issue of audience by asking students to consider readers outside of their immediate classroom environment. As such, students will need to learn how to produce interactive media compositions like blogs or web pages. As they incorporate new media (visual, aural, as well as written) into their compositions, they will need to learn how to use that material to complement and advance arguments and convey information.

Selfe and Kress, in various texts, both advocate an increase in teaching visual literacy in writing courses. Kress argues that the visual can be an equally productive (if not more so) means of conveying meaning as writing can be. And in today’s digital world, we need to realize that digital texts have already started using images whenever and wherever possible; we need to start teaching students how to do the same. Similarly, Selfe wants teachers to start incorporating visual texts into the classroom: we need to understand the communicative power and complexity of visual texts by reading and looking at them, analyzing them, talking with others about them, composing them, and reflecting on our compositions as symbolic interactions. This means that we need to focus once again on the delivery of texts when working with our students, especially when making multimodal compositions. Since we are no longer limited to the 8 ½ by 11-inch white sheet of paper, we need to help our students determine how to present their digital texts to a larger audience.

In “Made Only In Words: Composition In a New Key,” Kathleen Blake Yancey is calling for a new approach to teaching composition. In particular, she focuses on circulation, the notion that texts move across contexts, between media, and across time. For example, she considers Bolter’s “remediation” to be an example of this circulation: every medium is re/mediated on another medium, and we create the new medium in the context of the old and based on the old model. Yancey also brings up the notion of “deicity,” that is, that meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered. Both circulation and deicity have implications for delivery in Comp because keeping them in mind (that texts will be circulated and that meanings will rapidly change across contexts) will change how a text is delivered. For example, if students are writing a blog, they will need to consider that a) people may read it now, next week, next year, or even never, and they may do so in this country or another, and they may read it on their phone or a computer; and b) each new reading of that text will produce a new meaning because it will be seen in a different context. Students must consider these factors and many more when designing that blog post.

Alexander Reid argues in The Two Virtuals for teachers to consider a multimodal approach to the composition classroom. He wants us to develop pedagogies that see that full potential of new media and that help our students become rhetorically effective and critical users of new media. This means students would learn to make their own multimodal compositions by editing and mixing existing media objects and blending them with new video, audio, and/or text. Delivery, then, takes on a new character as it incorporates not only student-generated artifacts, but also student-found (“ripped”) media and blends both into a new composition. Reid terms this process “Rip, Mix, Burn” and argues that all of our thoughts follow this pattern. Ripping is pulling media from another source, mixing it is blending it all together with new artifacts, and burning is publishing it in a public place; Reid points out that at any point in the Rip, Mix, Burn process, a composer can decide to burn and then start the whole process again, though material can only be ripped from that which has already been burned. This suggests that teaching delivery encompasses teaching students when to burn and when to keep mixing.

In “Composing for Recomposition,” Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss are interested in something similar to Reid: they are interested in situations where composers compose with third-part recomposition in mind; in other words, they rip, mix, and burn while considering how others might eventually rip what they burn. This leads to composers considering their artifact’s “rhetorical velocity,” or considering how far and fast their artifact will travel once it is finished. Ridolfo and DeVoss adopt similar terminology to Reid: rather than rip, mix, burn, they refer to the whole process as “remix,” but they mean essentially the same thing. Composing with consideration of remix leads to a consideration of audience: how might a third party use this composition in a new way? Or, what potential third-party might want to use it? Composers would need to consider the future of the text as carefully as possible. This is similar to Yancey’s discussion of circulation and deicity of texts.

Delivery definitely needs to be reconsidered as an essential canon of rhetoric and composition education. Reconsidering its usefulness leads to helping our students see that using language is more than just writing papers for class; it is about creating meaning and sharing new knowledge with others across time and space. Refocusing on delivery in new media texts gives students an expanded notion of audience; they must consider how a reader/viewer/user in, say, Russia may perceive their texts, rather than just what their own classmates and teacher think of it. This leads to students studying themselves, really hearing/reading/understanding themselves, and seeing themselves as users of language.