LA 1300 · Trivium: The School of Rhetoric — Module 6: Memory

Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum

The canon a modern student thinks obsolete. A speaker who has memorised words can only deliver them; a speaker who has memorised places can move — and that is what the art was always for.

1. Module 6

   Memory

   Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum

   The question

   Six sittings. You begin by trying to deliver something you know well

   Outcome

   The student can construct a set of memory loci and use them to hold and

   Sub-units

   1. ○ 6.1 Why the Canon Survives Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   2. ○ 6.2 Loci: Building the Backgrounds Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   3. ○ 6.3 Images: What Makes a Thing Stick Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   4. ○ 6.4 Things and Words Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   5. ○ 6.5 Structure as Memory Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   6. ○ 6.6 Practice, and Recovery Open this unit → ✓ ↻
   Begin the course → Print certificate of completion

   Practice scenarios

   The Question From the Floor

   A colleague has prepared a twenty-minute presentation and delivered it well. Four minutes in, a senior person interrupts with a question that his slide eleven answers completely. He says he will come to it. She presses. He says again that he will come to it. By the time he reaches slide eleven she has stopped listening and two others have taken up her objection. The presentation is not recovered.

   Your goals

   • Identify what he should have done at the first interruption, and why he could not
   • Determine what capacity he lacked — it is not knowledge and not preparation
   • Say what the *second* refusal cost him, beyond the first
   • Describe how his material would need to be held for him to answer in the moment
   • Say whether the questioner was being unreasonable

   Practise this scenario →