Public Speaking
Great speeches and practical guidance on speaking well.
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Impromptu Speaking: How to Think on Your Feet Like a Roman Orator
How to speak well without preparation: the ancient orators’ storehouse of commonplaces, three reliable frames and daily drills for thinking on your feet.
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How to Structure a Speech: The Classical Six-Part Method
Exordium, narration, division, proof, refutation and peroration: the speech structure Cicero taught, and how to use it for anything from a pitch to a…
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How to Memorize a Speech: The Memory Palace of the Ancient Orators
The Roman orators spoke for hours without notes. Here is the memory palace method they used, step by step, so you can memorize your…
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Voice Exercises for Public Speaking: The Demosthenes Method
Demosthenes began with a weak voice and became the greatest orator of Athens. His training drills, adapted into safe, modern voice exercises for public…
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The Five Canons of Rhetoric: Cicero’s Complete Guide to Public Speaking
Invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery: the Roman map of the speaker’s art, explained with exercises you can use for your next speech.
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How to Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking: 8 Lessons from Demosthenes
The greatest orator of antiquity was laughed off the platform the first time he spoke. Eight lessons from Demosthenes for conquering the fear of…
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The Case for Teaching Rhetoric to Teenagers
For two thousand years, learning to speak and write persuasively was the crown of a young man’s education. The old method still works, and…
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How to Help a Shy Boy Speak in Public
The fear of speaking in front of people is nearly universal in boys and nearly always curable. A progression that works, from the dinner…
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The Art of The Gentleman’s Feast
A report from the Bull Moose Symposium, where 38 men from three states gathered in Nashville to discuss Theodore Roosevelt around one table.
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A Gathering of Gentlemen
Why great civilizations kept men’s societies, and how a Meriwether symposium dinner carries the tradition forward.