Five canons

The five canons come from the Roman teaching tradition, especially Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. They are a useful order for making a speech. They are not five kinds of people, and they are not a rule that planning runs in one direction. A change in the room can send you back to invention, arrangement, style, memory, or delivery.

• Invention

  Finding the available arguments. Definitions, comparisons, causes, circumstances, testimony, and the commonplaces the audience already half believes.

• Arrangement

  Ordering what you found so a later sentence can be believed. What has to come first is part of the argument.

• Style

  Choosing language that is clear, appropriate, and alive to this audience. Ornament is one virtue of style. It is the one people mistake for the whole canon.

• Memory

  Command of the material. You are not training a memory palace here. The surviving use is knowing the structure well enough to leave the script when the room changes.

• Delivery

  How the argument arrives. Voice, pace, gesture, and now the interface around the words: the first line, the slide that does not fight the sentence, the caption that can be heard without sound.

Invention gets skipped by writers who open a document and hope a thesis appears. Arrangement gets skipped by writers who find their point in the last paragraph and leave it there. Style gets reduced to vocabulary. Memory gets dismissed as obsolete, and then a question arrives that the script did not plan for. Delivery gets treated as charisma rather than as whether the case can be heard at all.

Latin teaching names, if you meet them elsewhere: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio. The Rhetorica ad Herennium I.2–3 is one source for the faculties and the parts of a speech. Ad Herennium I