Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • The whole art of oratory, as the most and greatest writers have taught, consists of five parts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

  • These five parts roughly correspond to the sequence in which you might imagine putting a speech—or, more broadly, any persuasive appeal—together. You think up what there is to say; you devise an order in which to say it; you light on the way in which you want to say it; you get all the aforementioned into your head; and then you take to your feet and let rip.

  • ARISTOTLE SAID THAT THE basic job of the rhetorician was to “discover the best available means of persuasion.” That’s what is meant, in this context, by “invention”: not making things up, but exploring what there is to say on a subject. The word’s root means to “come upon” something: to find what’s available to be said. Invention is doing your homework: thinking up in advance exactly what arguments can be made both for and against a given proposition, selecting the best on your own side, and finding counterarguments to those on the other. There will almost always be more lines of argument available than it will be possible or prudent to use. The skill is to find the ones that will hold most sway with your intended audience. If you’re running a rock venue, for instance, and you want to raise the ticket price on the door, the argument you’ll use to justify the move to your customers—that it will allow you to invest in better facilities, hire more famous bands, improve the gig-going experience, and so on—will not be the same as the argument you’ll make to your shareholders. Judging the audience is key, here. What are their positions in life? What are their interests and prejudices? What sex? What age? Aristotle, for instance, sets out in Rhetoric a whole series of characteristics that distinguish young people from old.

  • Aristotle identified three different lines of argument, or persuasive appeal, into which the process of invention divides. Thanks to my constitutional childishness, they have always sounded to me like the names by which the Three Musketeers really should have been known: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. These three fellows are the absolute bedrock of written and spoken persuasion. The first describes the way a speaker establishes—both overtly and more subtly—his bona fides as a speaker and his connection with the audience. The second is the way he seeks to influence them by reason (much the poor relation in all this, as witness the pervasive irrationality of human beings). And the third is the way in which he seeks to stir them to anger, pity, fear, or exultation. One crude way I’ve chosen to encapsulate them in the past is as follows. Ethos: “Buy my old car because I’m Tom Magliozzi.” Logos: “Buy my old car because yours is broken and mine is the only one on sale.” Pathos: “Buy my old car or this cute little kitten, afflicted with a rare degenerative disease, will expire in agony, for my car is the last asset I have in the world, and I am selling it to pay for kitty’s medical treatment.”

  • The ethos appeal is first among equals. How you present yourself—ordinarily the job of the opening few moments of your address—is the foundation on which all the rest is built. It establishes the connection between the speaker and the audience, and it steers how that speech will be received. Your audience needs to know (or to believe, which in rhetoric adds up to the same thing) that you are trustworthy, that you have a locus standi to talk on the subject, and that you speak in good faith. You need your audience to believe that you are, in the well-known words, “A pretty straight kind of guy.” Perhaps most important of all, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you will be seeking to persuade your audience that you are one of them: that your interests and their interests are identical in this case or, to be more convincing, in all cases.

  • If ethos is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your argument, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one. If in the course of it, you can make your opponents sound venal or even deranged, so much the better. Aristotle remarks, shrewdly, that the most effective form of argument is one that the audience is allowed to think it has worked out itself: one whose conclusion, in other words, the listener reaches just before, or just as, the speaker makes it. “The audience takes pleasure in themselves for anticipating the point.” Because logos shares a root with logic, it would be easy enough to assume that the two were roughly the same thing. They aren’t. Indeed, they are but distant cousins: logos in rhetoric being another of those bendy shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s well-known cave. Logos moves forward, but it leaps over gaps, sidles past obstacles, and—confronted with disaster—shouts, “Look! It’s Halley’s Comet!” and bolts for the exit.

  • Pathos is the appeal to emotion—not just sadness or pity, which is what a film critic will tend to mean when describing this or that scene as “full of pathos,” but excitement, fear, love, patriotism, or amusement. As Quintilian argues, unless we “can entice [our hearers] with delights, drag them along with the strength of our pleading and sometimes disturb them with emotional appeals . . . we cannot make even just and true cause prevail.”

  • IT IS A COMMONPLACE to say that a story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The same applies to any speech or extended piece of persuasive writing. After you’ve done your invention and discovered your proofs, you’ll have a mass of material that wants putting into some sort of shape—a shape best designed to maximize the strong arguments, minimize the weak ones, and flow as if inexorably to its conclusion. “It is not without reason,” Quintilian tells us, “that arrangement is considered the second of the five parts of oratory, for though all the limbs of a statue be cast, it is not a statue until they are united, and if, in our own bodies or those of any other animals, we were to displace or alter the position of any part, they would be but monsters, though they had the same number of parts.”

  • It’s worth having a sense of the basic off-the-rack structure of a speech before you dive into bespoke couture. The simplest scheme is Aristotle’s—who said that a speech is a thing of two halves. There’s the narration, where you set out the points at issue, and the proof, where you make the arguments for your case. At most, and grudgingly, he admitted you could go up to four parts if you include an introduction and a conclusion.

  • The most influential rhetorical handbook between the ages of Cicero and Shakespeare, however, Ad Herennium, gives us six parts, which is the scheme I propose to adopt. Most more-andless elaborate schemes are effectively variations. Ad Herennium sets the parts of a speech out as follows:
    • Exordium (also prooimion) This is where you set out your stall. It’s the point at which you establish your bona fides as a speaker, grab the audience’s attention, and hope to keep it. The strongest up-front ethos appeal will tend to come here.
    • Narration (also diegesis, prothesis, or narratio) Corresponding to Aristotle’s notion of narration, this is where you levelly and reasonably set out the area of argument, and the facts of the case as generally understood.
    • Division (also divisio, propositio, or partitio) Here’s where you set out what you and your opponents agree about; and the areas on which you disagree.
    • Proof (also pistis, confirmatio, or probatio) This is where you set out the arguments supporting your case. Here’s where logos comes to the fore.
    • Refutation (also confutatio or reprehensio) More logos. This is, as the name suggests, the part of an oration in which you smash your opponent’s arguments into little tiny pieces.
    • Peroration (also epilogos or conclusio) The grand finale. If you have flourishes, prepare to flourish them now, and if you have tears, prepare to shed them. In the peroration, you sum up what has gone before, reiterate your strongest points, and drive to your conclusion. It’s usually the place for the pathos appeal to reach its height.

  • hat, as it doesn’t take much noticing, is more or less how we’re taught to write essays at school. It’s a pretty familiar pattern, and the variations that are played on it—you can, for instance, add a decorative Digression in near the end; you can interleave some emotional appeals with the more evidential sections in the middle; or you can subdivide any of the constituent parts—don’t alter its essential structure. The job you are doing is to establish yourself with the audience, frame the terms of debate, find a way of appearing to take your opponent’s arguments (actual or implied) into account, then load the dice in your own favor, and roll them with a triumphant flick of the wrist.

  • The purpose of the exordium is to put the audience into a receptive and attentive frame of mind. It’s helpful to tell them—like the nightclub host who greets you, “Ladies and gentlemen: have we got a show for you tonight!”—that important, new, and unusual matters will be offered to their ears. And it’s helpful to make clear why it’s you who will be discussing them.

  • Ad Herennium wants the narration to have three qualities: brevity, clarity, and plausibility. Note above all others the third of these. When setting out the facts of the case, the orator is no less able to shape the debate to his purposes than he is when openly mounting an argument—indeed he is probably more so because he speaks under cover of ostensible neutrality.

  • The narration is one of the prime areas of a speech in which you are able to spin, and framing the terms of the debate is half the battle won. Don’t talk about cutting welfare provision and giving tax breaks to the rich; talk about creating a Big Society where people are given control over their own destinies. Don’t talk about repealing safety regulation; talk about cutting red tape. And so on. The question of definition isn’t restricted to using emotive or euphemistic language. It also carries over to logos: how you define the argument as a whole. We like to simplify things to a choice between A and B, so even if a given question is more complicated, we’re vulnerable to someone presenting it in such a way.

  • Division and narration are two ends of a pantomime horse. The former follows fairly briskly on from the latter; or should do, if onstage catastrophe is to be avoided. In division, you start by summarizing the salient points of agreement, then set out the points that are at issue.

  • You have established the facts, indicated the grounds of dispute, and now you set out to make your case in earnest. You will use arguments of analogy and probability and induction.

  • Appealing to authority—whether by quoting a commonplace or the words of a named source—always strengthens an argument. Rhetoric is about connecting with an audience; that means finding shared assumptions. And those shared assumptions are usually pretty conservative: we don’t reinvent the world from scratch every time we float a theory. As a species, we follow living leaders and—oddly, but it seems universally—we one way or another honor our dead. The idea of authority is all over our moral and intellectual lives like orange on Doritos—whether we’re applying Karl Marx’s ideas to the behavior of modern capitalism, or the teachings of the Koran to our own day-to-day lives. So however questionable they may seem on intellectual principle, those great oxymorons—“common sense” and “received wisdom”—are profoundly important in persuasion. Well-known quotations embody both of these things: they come with the imprimatur both of ancient derivation, and of the many people who, by passing it on, in some way are understood to have endorsed it.

  • Proof and refutation are another of these linked pairs. In most adversarial situations, to prove your own case is to disprove your opponent’s—though rhetoric being as slippery as it is, the task is seldom precisely symmetrical. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, as the old bumper sticker has it, baffle them with bullshit. The skilled orator is out not necessarily to knock down his opponent’s case tout court—but to misrepresent his opponent’s case in such a way as to make it easier to attack. You can indignantly answer a charge nobody made, or fiercely deny something adjacent to the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Bill Clinton told the American people at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—choosing not to gloss his remark with the information that he didn’t regard oral sex as “sexual relations.” You can burlesque your opponent’s position in a way that makes it unattractive to the audience. President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms in 2010, for instance, were characterized by ideological opponents as “socialist” or “communist,”* and he was accused of proposing to set up “death panels” to decide whether invalids lived or died. If your own case is weak, you may even want to reverse the order in which proof and refutation come: reduce your opponent to smoldering rubble in the hopes that nobody then notices how feeble the case you mount afterward is. The nature of the Western tradition in rhetoric (as in dialectic) is adversarial: it is better at dealing with either/or propositions than and/also possibilities or neither/nors.

  • The peroration is where the orator can really have fun. This is the opportunity to end on a twenty-one-gun salute, to move the audience to tears of pity or howls of rage, to wheel out your grandest figures and highest-sounding words. It can be like watching Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band close a show with “Born To Run” and belt the final chorus out four times in a row. Figures of auxesis and repetition—often pulling together words or themes from earlier in the speech—commonly proliferate in the peroration, and many orators will crank it up a little in the direction of the grand style. But it can also be the place for a dying fall—where you bring the ship of your speech into the calm waters of harbor. Sometimes you want to leave an audience thoughtful, rather than excitable. The point is that the peroration shapes the impression—intellectually, yes, but above all in terms of emotion or tone—with which the audience comes away from your speech.

  • Most discussions of style over the years have followed Cicero in identifying, at least roughly, three kinds—the high or grand style, the low or plain style, and the middle style.

  • The plain style—valued for clarity, brevity, and the effect of sincerity—is the one of which, in the twentieth century, George Orwell was both the great champion and the great exemplar.

  • A good orator will hope to have a command of all three—and will be capable where appropriate of mixing them up a bit in a single speech. A narration might ask for the clarity and emotional temper of the plain style, for example, whereas the peroration—where you typically seek to stir your audience—gives the opportunity for a higher style. In deciding which style to use in a given circumstance, it is decorum that shapes your choice. Decorum can be seen as the ethos appeal working at the level of the language itself. Indeed, bracketing decorum under the heading of style is, to some extent, to put the cart before the horse. As a rhetorical concept, decorum encompasses not only the more obvious features of style, but kairos, or the timeliness of a speech, the tone and physical comportment of the speaker, the commonplaces and topics of argument chosen, and so on. It is a giant umbrella concept meaning no more nor less than the fitting of a speech to the temper and expectations of its audience. So not all of decorum comes under the heading of style. But everything there is to say about style has to do with decorum.

  • How a piece of rhetoric sounds—and this applies just as much whether it is heard out loud or scanned by the inner ear while being read on the page—is vital to its effectiveness. Here, again, we see where rhetoric and poetics share territory. Why does sound matter? It matters in rhetoric for the same reason that it matters in poetry.

  • Repetition (because rhyme, alliteration, and the tick-tock of a pentameter are all, at root, no more than forms of repetition) makes things memorable, as we know from learning our times tables. Fixed epithets like Homeric formulae—wine-dark seas and rosy-fingered dawns and all the rest of it—are thought to have acted as filler, giving a poet the time to remember or improvise the next few lines while he spiels them out. And repetition in larger narrative structures—as witness the shape of everything from fairytales and myths to The Gruffalo—is what makes them seem coherent, memorable, self-achieved, and, in effect, meaningful.

  • When you talk about Churchill’s “great rolling periods”—meaning his long, mellifluous sentences—you are primarily talking about sound effects: the gather and surge of a sentence toward its climax. Pauses or parentheses may change the flow of meaning—but they also, often more importantly, change the flow of sound.

  • T. S. Eliot once said something to the effect that meaning, in poetry, is the bone that the burglar throws to the watchdog: the meaning of a poem is there to distract the conscious mind while the poem does its real work round the back. The same isn’t entirely true of rhetoric—the meaning of a speech is important—but it is partially true: the sound of a speech works on the mind and emotions of the audience beneath the conscious level at which the meaning is considered.

  • Controlling the tense of an argument is a very good way of controlling its direction because it is, essentially, a way of controlling which branch of oratory you find yourself in. A wily speaker will have the capacity to jump back and forth between the judicial and the deliberative branches like an oratorical orangutan. If you’re uncomfortably on the spot about something in the past, move to the future tense. “Yes. Mistakes have been made, and we’re in the process of being bailed out by an IMF loan that our children’s children will still be beggared by. But what matters now is that we stop slinging recriminations about, pull together, and set about building a brighter future.” On the other hand, if you’re arguing against someone about what to do in the future, find something in the past with which to discredit him. “It’s all very well for you to say we need to increase corporation tax to pay off our debt to the IMF. But do you really expect us to take your advice on economics, O’Malley, given that the whole governmental Ponzi scheme that got us here in the first place was your damn-fool idea?” If you’re scared of both the past and the future, having a dismal record in the former and no ideas for the latter, you can always just wallow in the present tense of demonstrative rhetoric. Find something to praise or deplore, and do it in such a way that you draw the tribe together: “Yes. We have our troubles. But the people of Ireland are steadfast in adversity. When I think of this country of ours, this great nation gleaming like an emerald in the Irish sea, I know that there is no place better fixed—no people better fixed—to ride out the storms of a crisis and come safely into the harbor of prosperity. God bless all of us.”

  • Lincoln was, by habit, a slow and careful polisher of his speeches. It stretches plausibility to the breaking point that he would have decided to deliver one as important as this off the cuff. He was also an accomplished actor, who loved to declaim Shakespeare aloud. He thought about delivery as well as about composition. The care with which he was thinking about it in advance is evidenced by the fact that, a few days before, he asked the man who landscaped the cemetery to bring him the plans, so he could familiarize himself with the layout of where he’d be speaking. The speech, like the myth of its offhandedness, is one thing that appears another. It is an absolute masterpiece of the plain style. It is fiercely well patterned in almost every phrase—“government of the people, by the people, for the people,” its most resonant coinage, manages to be tricolonic, zeugmatic, and epistrophic all at the same time—yet sounds clear as day. The particulars of the battle and the politics behind it are barely alluded to—there’s no mention of the Union or of Gettysburg; no honoring of the particular dead; there are no proper nouns, and no descriptive adjectives. And look at the modest, talky straightforwardness of phrases like, “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Yet underneath it is a web of muscle. Sentence is bound to sentence with repeated words—“conceive,” “dedicate,” “consecrate”—and with the antitheses of “we” and “they,” “living” and “dead.” Its shape is guided by the image of birth, death, and rebirth: the birth of a nation, the death of its soldiers, and the “new birth” of liberty that comes out of it. The speech’s very abstraction gives it its strength: it has the gnomic, exemplary force of parts of the Bible (not to mention the conscious Biblical echo with which it opens). Also, as scholars have pointed out, it follows exactly—whether consciously or not—the shape of a classic Attic funeral oration: it begins by praising the dead and aligning them with noble ancestors; it asks those present to temper their mourning with knowledge of the great deeds that the dead have done; and it enjoins the living to carry on the work that has yet to be done.

  • In centuries past, pulpit preachers, rabble-rousers at political rallies, parliamentarians, and lawyers would be expected to thunder on—sometimes literally for hours—without a shred of a note. In the first place, the very fact that we’re impressed when people speak without notes is a recommendation for the art of memory. Even if you have an autocue or a fistful of notes, the point at which you appear to abandon them is the point at which you capture your audience: you appear to be speaking to them, rather than at them. Sprezzatura—that quality of life and spontaneity in a speech—is the thing to aim for. And it is seldom achieved without practice. So memory, as it matters in rhetoric, is not simply about rote learning any more than oratory is about recitation. It is about allowing the elements of the speech, and the ideas behind it, to inhabit your mind so that what’s being delivered arises freshly and naturally from your thoughts. A command of the material—including the arguments against as well as for his or her own position—is what allows the speaker to adapt a speech to the mood of the audience, to engage with counterarguments that are raised, and to move from one point to another with the ease of someone traveling through well-known territory. Public speaking, like writing, is in many ways a confidence trick. Why do so many people—capable of delivering whole paragraphs of coherent argument in one-on-one conversation—falter when asked to speak in public? “My mind’s gone blank,” they say. If you’ve ever delivered a speech yourself, you’ll know that it’s in the first few moments that you know if it’s going to work. As the audience digests your first few words, and you relax into it, you realize that the rest of the speech is at your command. It is available to your memory. The first step shows you the second; the second the third; and by the time you’ve hit the third, you can see the fourth and fifth clear ahead of you in sequence. You’ll feel free to ad-lib in the confidence that you can return to your thread. But when it goes wrong, the feeling is not one of incompetence, but of blankness: panic begets panic, and you turn away from the audience and into your own head, trying to find the words—your mind churning at the active attempt to recall and recite when, with confidence, what you know you need to say could and should spring to mind without conscious effort.

  • As a wartime leader, you need to make yourself both of and above your audience. You need to stress the identity of their interests with yours, to create unity in a common purpose. You need, therefore, to cast yourself as the ideal exemplar of all that is best and most determined and most courageous in your people.

  • Nervous to the point of nausea before addressing an audience, Churchill consulted specialists as a young man in the hopes of ridding himself of his speech defects. He had both a stammer and a lisp, and was set to reciting, “The Spanish ships I cannot see them, for they are not in sight” in order to overcome them. He rehearsed his speeches—gestures and all—in front of a mirror until he got them right. When, one day, his butler overheard him thundering away from his bathtub, he approached to see what the matter was. “I wasn’t talking to you,” said Sir Winston irritably, “I was addressing the House of Commons.” (One likes to imagine him pressing home his point with a well-aimed rubber duck.)

  • In a way, as with Churchill, his public voice at the peak of his accomplishment was no more than the harnessing and turning outward of a private style. The tirade was Hitler’s dominant note. Where Churchill rumbled—with occasional sharp interventions of humor or domesticity—Hitler shouted. But shouting in itself is an appeal both to ethos and pathos—it betokens a conviction that overwhelms the speaker’s control; it throws him, weirdly, on the mercy of his audience because it creates the impression that artifice has evaporated under the pressure of feeling. A high-risk strategy, but one that can be thrillingly effective if the audience buys it: if you can fake sincerity, as the man said, you got it made. Hitler was a ranter from way back. In 1920, during his bohemian phase, he was a party guest at the Munich house of a composer, Clemens von Franckenstein. He showed up in a floppy hat, and carrying a riding whip (it was a prop: he didn’t know how to ride), which he cracked on his boots from time to time to impress the other guests. It didn’t work. One of them described him as looking like a waiter. When he started conversing though, “He went on at us like a division chaplain in the army. I got the impression of basic stupidity.” Soon, those present recalled, the prevailing feeling was of being stuck in a railway carriage with a lunatic. Unfortunately—and in much the same way as Churchill, though it may be bad taste to insist on the parallel—by the mid-1930s that lunatic’s time had come. His rants, too, were somewhat more under control than they might have looked. He wrote his own speeches in the early years—but later moved on to dictating them to secretaries. Those secretaries were expected to get them down verbatim, while he delivered them as he would to an eventual audience. Traudl Junge, the young secretary whose memoir of the last days in the Fuhrer-bunker formed the basis for the film Downfall, recalled him composing the speech he gave to mark the tenth anniversary of his dictatorship. He started out mumbling almost inaudibly, and pacing up and down, but by the time his speech reached its crescendo he had his back to her and was yelling at the wall.

  • These drafts would be worked over and over until he was happy with the whole performance. Like Churchill, he would practice his speeches in front of a mirror, and he was near-obsessive about choreographing every detail in advance—right down to scouting the acoustics of the venue. And as every schoolchild knows, he was deeply interested in the theatrics of setting, too: flags, massed ranks, dramatic lighting, and martial music. He would be the centerpiece, but the flummery surrounding him was vital to the whole effect.

  • Hitler was, as is well known, a genius at the rhetorical use of not talking. The typical opening to a really corking Adolf Hitler speech is “. . .” It could go on for anything up to half a minute, which is (you’ll know if you’ve tried it) a very, very long time to stand on a stage without saying or doing anything. When he started—which he’d typically do while the applause was still fading out, causing the audience to prick up its ears the more—he would do so at a slow pace and in a deep voice. The ranting was something he built up to, taking the audience with him. He preferred to speak in the evening, believing that “in the morning and during the day it seems that the power of the human will rebels with its strongest energy against any attempt to impose upon it the will or opinion of another. On the other hand, in the evening it easily succumbs to the domination of a stronger will.” Thus speaks a man who got his start launching his Putsches from beer halls. He’s said to have picked up acting tips from a favorite Bavarian comedian, Weiss-Ferdl. He learned to turn his distinctive accent and strident, harsh voice to advantage, and—though he was quite capable of genuine hysterical rages—he also had the trick of turning them on and off at will. There’s a telling story from Ribbentrop’s secretary, Reinhard Spitzy, about an occasion when, while entertaining guests, Hitler learned that a British diplomat had arrived to see him. “Don’t let him in yet,” Hitler told the servant who had answered the door, “I’m still in a good mood.” Before the eyes of his guests, Hitler worked himself up into a purple-faced rage, then made his excuses and went to meet the diplomat. He returned to the room in due course, full of smiles and chuckles. “He thinks I’m furious!” he told them.

  • Hitler combined a mesmeric power over crowds with a profound contempt for them. “The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts,” he is claimed to have told Hermann Rauschning. “They do not reach conclusions by reasoning. . . . At a mass meeting, thought is eliminated.”

  • Just as style may vary according to where you are in the speech, so will the delivery. Ad Herennium recommends “for the Introduction a voice as calm and composed as possible,” for instance. Under the heading of “Flexibility” it divides the registers of voice into “Conversational Tone” (“relaxed and close to daily speech”—suitable for your exordium and digression), “Tone of Debate” (“energetic, and suited to both proof and refutation”) and the “Tone of Amplification,” which “either rouses the hearer to wrath or moves him to pity.”

  • For most of those of us who really are unaccustomed to speaking in public, probably the single most important point about delivery is pace. Most people, particularly when nervous, talk too fast. Slowing . . . it . . . down . . . until . . . it’s . . . on . . . the . . . verge . . . of . . . feeling . . . unbearable . . . is just about the way to go. A key expositor of the modern-day handbook tradition, Gyles Brandreth, identifies “a comfortable speed” as 110 words per minute—“just a shade slower than in ordinary conversation,” though it’s as well to bear in mind that what to the audience will sound “a shade slower” probably feels positively treacly to the speaker.

  • When it comes to physical gestures, Brandreth has sensible advice for the modern rhetor too. “Most of us take little notice of our hands,” he writes, “until, that is, we have to speak in public, and then they appear uncommonly large and obtrusive.” He counsels against the folded arms and hands-in-pockets look, and recommends instead resting one’s hands lightly on either side of the podium (if there is one, and it’s at chest-height), or—if at a table or on a stage—clasping them lightly together in front of the waist. He advises, contra accepted wisdom, that letting your hands hang loosely by your sides “looks too false” (we might add that it feels almost unbearably unnatural, and that the attempt to hold them there will almost certainly result in some involuntary swinging back and forth better suited to the diving board than the board meeting), and that only Prince Philip can really get away with clasping his hands behind his back (nota bene, Prince Charles). As for mannerisms, he says, “the basic rule is . . . avoid them altogether.” Fiddling with props, twiddling a cuff-button, rotating a wedding ring, or tugging at an earlobe will all distract the audience from what you’re actually saying. If these are unconscious, they need to be consciously expunged. If they are deliberate . . . well, it’s time to deliberate again.

  • The best advice remains: be yourself—but that injunction, as the commerce between rhetorical delivery and acting suggests, can be unpacked. The good speaker plays himself—and does so using the total immersion technique of a dedicated method actor. “Good delivery,” as the author of Ad Herennium tells us, “ensures that what the orator is saying seems to come from his heart.” Fool yourself first, and the audience will follow.

  • Deliberative rhetoric is associated with the future: to act or not to act. In terms of Cicero’s identification of the three offices of oratory—to teach (docere), to delight (delectare), and to move (movere)—deliberative rhetoric has as its prime task the latter. Persuading somebody to believe something (as a preacher might) or persuading somebody to do something (as a leader might) is the essence of the deliberative mode. Aristotle identified two basic lines of attack: virtue or vice, and advantage or disadvantage. You can try to persuade your audience, in other words, that a given course of action is the right thing to do; or you can try to persuade them that it’s in their interests. If you can press the case in both respects, so much the better.

  • JUDICIAL RHETORIC, OR FORENSIC rhetoric as it is also sometimes called, is rhetoric that deals with the past: the rhetoric not so much of praise and blame but of conviction and exoneration. It seeks to establish what happened, why it happened, and whether the actors involved were at fault in terms of the moral law or the law of the land. Judicial rhetoric has also tended to receive the most extensive treatment in rhetoric handbooks and the teaching of rhetoric. Even in the ancient world, high-level participation in politics was less common than involvement in the law courts. Edward Corbett and Robert Connors record that, in ancient Athens, “It was a rare citizen who did not go to court at least a half a dozen times during the course of his adult life.”1 So for those who made their money teaching rhetoric, it was the bread and butter of their business. And it was judicial rhetoric in which probably the most influential orator of all time, Cicero, made his name. As the name suggests, judicial rhetoric’s classic instance is the language of the courtroom—and our addiction to its rigor and aggression, its swift reverses and baroque perorations, can be seen in the legal dramas that continue to fill our screens and theaters. But judicial rhetoric is everywhere that blame is: the post-mortem after a costly mistake in the office; the free and frank discussion you have with your no-good boyfriend after reading his text messages; or the inquiry that goes on when the sound of wailing toddlers summons you to the playroom and two tearful children simultaneously yell, “He started it!” If deliberative rhetoric turns on the four special topics of advantage, disadvantage, virtue, and vice, judicial rhetoric is concerned (Aristotle tells us) with two special topics: justice and injustice. For practical purposes, however—and to extend the symmetry with the forensic branch in what I hope is a sensible manner—we could add to that pair the question of legality and illegality.

  • A popular Greco-Roman scheme divides the questions of stasis into four:
    • Conjectural stasis deals with questions of fact: Did he do it?
    • Definitional stasis deals with questions of definition: What kind of thing did he do?
    • Qualitative stasis deals with questions of quality: Was it legal or was it just?
    • Translative stasis deals with questions of jurisdiction: Is this the right court in which to be trying the question?