The Five Canons of Rhetoric: Cicero’s Complete Guide to Public Speaking

Ask a modern speaking coach how to give a good speech and you will often get a list of tips: make eye contact, slow down, tell a story. The tips are fine. What they lack is a map. The Roman orators had one, and it remains the most complete account of the speaker’s art ever drawn up. They called its parts the five canons of rhetoric.

The canons appear in the young Cicero’s treatise On Invention and in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a Roman handbook from the same era that was long attributed to Cicero himself. Cicero returned to them throughout his life, above all in his great dialogue On the Orator. For centuries afterward, from Quintilian’s schools to the grammar schools of the Renaissance, every educated man in Europe learned to speak by working through them.

Here is what each canon means and how to use it in a speech you have to give this month.

I. Invention (inventio): finding what to say

Invention is the discovery of material: the arguments, facts, examples and appeals that fit the subject, the audience and the occasion. It is the canon most speakers skip. They sit down to write before they have gathered anything worth writing.

The ancients approached invention systematically. Aristotle taught that a speaker persuades in three ways: by his character (ethos), by moving the emotions of his hearers (pathos), and by reasoning (logos). Before writing a word, ask three questions. Why should this audience trust me? What do they care about, fear or hope for? What evidence and reasoning will actually convince them?

• List every argument you can think of, then keep only the strongest.
• Gather one concrete example or story for each main point.
• Write down the objections your audience is likely to raise.

II. Arrangement (dispositio): putting it in order

Arrangement is the ordering of the material. A strong argument in the wrong place loses force; a weak one placed well can carry. The classical handbooks taught a standard order with six parts, beginning with an introduction that wins goodwill and ending with a conclusion that sums up and stirs the hearers to act. We walk through each part, with examples from Cicero and Lincoln, in how to structure a speech.

For short remarks, a simpler rule from the same tradition works: tell them where you are going, take them there, and tell them where they have been. And place your strongest point either first or last, never buried in the middle.

III. Style (elocutio): choosing the words

Style is the clothing of thought in language. The Roman teachers prized four virtues of style: correctness, clarity, appropriateness to the occasion, and ornament, meaning the figures of speech that make language vivid and memorable. They also distinguished three levels: a plain style for teaching, a middle style for pleasing, and a grand style for moving an audience to action. Cicero tied these to what he saw as the three duties of the orator: to teach, to delight and to move.

Practical rules for modern speakers:

• Prefer short words and short sentences when speaking. The ear cannot reread.
• Use repetition on purpose. Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people” is unforgettable because of its pattern.
• Use one vivid image where an abstraction would be forgotten.
• Match the style to the room. A toast is not a closing argument.

IV. Memory (memoria): holding the speech in mind

The Romans spoke without notes, and they did not do it by rote repetition alone. They used a technique Cicero traces to the Greek poet Simonides: the method of places, now often called the memory palace. The speaker pictures a familiar building and places a vivid image for each point of the speech in a different room, then walks through the building in his mind as he speaks.

Memory is what frees a speaker to look at his audience. You do not need to memorize every word; you need to own the structure and the key lines. The full technique, step by step, is in how to memorize a speech.

V. Delivery (actio or pronuntiatio): voice and presence

Delivery is the performance of the speech: voice, pace, pause, posture, gesture and expression. It is the canon audiences notice first, and the one Demosthenes famously ranked first, second and third in importance. A brilliant speech mumbled into a lectern fails; a modest speech delivered with conviction can carry a room.

Delivery is also the most trainable canon. Demosthenes overcame a weak voice and unclear speech through relentless drills. We describe them, with modern exercises you can do at home, in voice exercises for public speaking. And if nerves are your main obstacle, start with how to overcome the fear of public speaking.

The orator must teach, he must delight, and he must move.

After Cicero, on the duties of the orator

How to use the five canons this week

Take any speech you have coming up, even a five-minute report at work, and run it through the canons in order:

1. Invention: spend twenty minutes listing arguments, examples and objections before you outline anything.
2. Arrangement: choose your three strongest points and put the best one last.
3. Style: rewrite your opening and closing sentences until they are short enough to say in one breath.
4. Memory: place each main point in a room of your house and walk through it twice.
5. Delivery: rehearse standing up, at full volume, three times, and record the last one.

This is the same order the ancient schools followed, and it is the curriculum of Meriwether Academy’s Orators Club, the public speaking club for men we are founding in Nashville. Every session works on at least one canon, with a lesson from the classical handbooks and then practice on our feet.

A map that still works

The five canons have survived for two thousand years because they describe what actually happens when one person persuades another. Every speech must be found, ordered, worded, remembered and delivered. A speaker who learns to work through all five no longer depends on luck or talent. He has a method, and a method can be practiced until it becomes second nature. For the life of the man who wrote it down, read Plutarch’s Life of Cicero.