Oratory and Rhetoric: Skills Training for the Modern Age

Last week I attended a conference on Oratory and Rhetoric: Ancient to Early Modern at University College London. My own research looks at both classical antiquity and its reception in the early modern period, and it was a pleasure to hear papers focused specifically on the transmission and use of ancient materials. In addition to such scholarly joys, however, there was a question which kept rising during the presentations as well as in the discussions afterwards: the potential application of oratory and rhetoric for modern life. What advice would a classical rhetorician, or an early modern one, give about the practical uses of effective language?

 

This is a topic that interests me, but I would like to approach it a little sideways. Oratory and rhetoric have a long history with many areas of focus, and one which I’ve been researching recently is the idea of rhetoric as praxis, as a practical wisdom which enables us to respond to and manage varied information – factual data, persuasive arguments, the mood of your audience. Rhetoric is, at heart, about manipulating language in order to produce a certain response. This involves figuring out what constitutes effective language, and in the history of rhetoric and oratory we have thousands of years of research into the best way to teach this skill.

Aristotle in the fourth century BCE categorised rhetoric as a practical science, with an aim not just to produce knowledge, but also to induce action. Cicero in the first century BCE positioned rhetoric as the organising principle of all fields of inquiry. Both of these writers had an immense impact on later developments in education, particularly rhetorical skills training – Cicero, for one, was used as the ideal model of good writing for several centuries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

One of the ways in which this training was accomplished was by asking students to produce detailed commentaries on ancient texts, involving an analysis of the different parts of speech: the choice of vocabulary, the structure of the argument, the effect created by emotive or rational appeals. These commentaries survive, with varying levels of originality, from the fourth century CE onwards, which means that we can follow the different ways people have understood what constitutes effective language. They also allow us to unpack the cultural logic which underpins their ideas – if Quintilian in the first century CE warns against speaking ‘effeminately’, does he say this for the same reasons that orators in the twenty-first century would?

The ability to analyse the construction of a given text is a skill we teach in English Literature courses; our students are trained to assess style and content as well as historical and political context, and to create elegantly formed and well-knit arguments (ideally!) based on their readings. And although this is a practice generally applied to literary texts, I have in my lecturing days invited my students to perform a rhetorical analysis of an academic article – because how can you write an argument if you don’t know how to read one?

This kind of critical intelligence is the primary outcome of a humanities education, but knowing how to assess arguments has use beyond academia. Being capable of analysing both the intended point of a text and the strategies employed to create that effect is a key part of media literacy – this is something we all need to know in order to judge things like political speeches, or the validity of a blog post, or even the quality of a newspaper article. Moreover, the ability to apply these critical skills into your own writing – deciding the appropriate language and the relevant content for a job application or a professional email – is crucial for modern life.

The historical study of oratory and rhetoric includes a wealth of strategies for teaching these skills, which can, in turn, be applied to modern needs and modern training practices. And if impact in higher education is about delivering transferable skills, here is a vast source of research that is waiting to be tapped. Who would not want to attend a CPD session inspired by Cicero’s rhetorical practice? Or communications workshop based on Quintilian and gendered language?

Sources: 

Aristotle, Rhetoric.

Cicero, De Oratore.

Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria.