Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
About this course
The second half of elocutio, and a student who has done the Grammar school arrives already holding half of it. Grammar Module 3 gave the taxonomy — barbarism and solecism, the metaplasms, the schemata, the tropes. You can already name what a poet has done.
This module gives the use. Naming a figure is a reader's skill; choosing one is a writer's, and they are not the same competence. So one question is asked of every figure, relentlessly: what does it do? And its companion, which is the subtraction test you have met twice already: removed and stated plainly, what is lost? A figure removable without loss should be removed.
The tradition's classification is worth having: figures of speech are in the arrangement of words, figures of thought in the arrangement of thought — and the test is translation. Anaphora survives translation badly; a rhetorical question survives perfectly. Quintilian ranks thought above speech for a reason that matters: figures of speech ornament, figures of thought argue.
The module ends where the school began. Anadiplosis makes a chain feel inevitable whether or not its links hold. Antithesis asserts that two options exhaust the ground, by form, below the level at which an audience argues. A rhetorical question makes the audience produce a conclusion they then hold as their own. Every one is an effect on belief produced by arrangement rather than evidence — which is exactly Plato's charge from Module 1, and you will now know how to do it.
Spoken exercise is used; much of this family is audible.
Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
The question
Eight sittings. You begin by being given flat prose to improve with
Outcome
The student can choose a figure for the work it does rather than for
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A speech you helped prepare has succeeded beyond expectation. The audience was moved, the vote went your way, and a colleague has told you that one passage in particular changed her mind. You look at it. It is a triple anaphora ending in an antithesis, and reading it cold you notice the antithesis is false — the two options do not exhaust the ground, and a third was available and never mentioned. Nobody noticed. The vote is not reversible.
Your goals