Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
About this course
The fourth canon, and the one you will think obsolete. The objection is not stupid: an orator memorised because he had no alternative, and you have notes, screens and recordings.
Three answers, in ascending order.
Practical. A speaker reading is a speaker not watching, and watching is not politeness — it is information. An audience tells you continuously whether they are following and whether they believe you, and a speaker who cannot see that is flying blind.
Compositional. Material shaped to be held is thereby shaped to be followed. The structures that make a speech memorable are exactly Module 2.8's requirements for the ear.
Structural, and this is the case. The ancient art was not chiefly for retaining words. It was for holding a structure of material available and rearrangeable — which is what lets a speaker take an argument out of order, abandon a passage that is failing, or answer what he was not expecting. A speaker who has memorised words can only deliver them. A speaker who has memorised places can move.
The technique is the method of loci — backgrounds that are permanent and reusable, images that are temporary and wiped like writing on wax. The Rhetorica ad Herennium gives the fullest ancient account. Quintilian is more sceptical of it than his own tradition is, particularly about memorising words by images, and the module teaches the art and reports the scepticism, because a tradition disagreeing with itself about the central technique of its own canon is worth knowing.
The exercises are mostly done away from the screen, and recall is aloud — because rereading feels like learning and is not.
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
Practice scenarios
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