[6]
The orator, who speaks
methodically, will above all take the actual sequence
of the various points as his guide, and it is for this
reason that even but moderately trained speakers
find it easiest to keep the natural order in the statement of facts. Secondly, the orator must know
what to look for in each portion of his case: he
must not beat about the bush or allow himself to be
thrown off the track by thoughts which suggest
themselves from irrelevant quarters, or produce a
speech which is a confused mass of incongruities,
[p. 137]
owing to his habit of leaping this way and that, and
never sticking to any one point.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.