Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
About this course
Modules 1 and 2 taught what to say and how to order it. Both are analytic — you decide, judge, arrange. Neither builds the capacity to compose, which is a different thing and is built by doing.
A student who has done Modules 1 and 2 can tell you what a good speech would contain and cannot write one. This module closes that gap the way the ancients did: by graduated exercise, each small enough to finish, each adding exactly one difficulty.
The progymnasmata were the standard compositional curriculum of Greek and Roman education for over a thousand years. Aphthonius's version was the most used; Quintilian describes the sequence in his second book. They are the most successful writing curriculum ever devised, by the plain measure of how long they lasted and how many people they produced who could compose.
A student who has done LA 2100 will recognise the method exactly — one new difficulty at a time, never two. Thomson's arithmetic and Aphthonius's composition are the same pedagogy applied to different material, seventeen centuries apart.
Fourteen exercises: fable, narrative, chreia, proverb, refutation, confirmation, commonplace, encomium, invective, comparison, impersonation, description, thesis, legislation. All fourteen are named and located; eight are worked. Fable is the smallest complete composition possible; legislation is a deliberative speech in miniature; everything between adds one element.
Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
The question
Eight sittings. You begin with a fable, the smallest thing that is a
Outcome
The student can compose to a set exercise rather than waiting for
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A capable colleague must produce three pages by tomorrow and has written four sentences in six hours. He knows the subject thoroughly and can tell you in conversation, fluently and at length, exactly what he thinks. On the page he produces one flat paragraph and stops, and has concluded that he is simply not a writer.
Your goals