Hey, and welcome back to classical stuff you should know.

My name is AJ Hanberg, and I am here with.

Graham Donaldson.

And we are a couple of teachers at a classical school, and this is classical stuff you should know.

So today I'll be taking the floor, and what I'm talking about is one of the five canons of rhetoric.

So in the practice of rhetoric, which is pretty much what you use whenever you're talking to someone

or trying to convince anyone of anything, it's all rhetoric, even what they call ceremonial discourse.

So at a funeral, if you're going to give up and give a speech, that's rhetoric. So the five canons, the five pieces of rhetoric that they think about are invention or coming up with stuff to say, arrangement, putting it in the right order, style, making it sound real good, memory, which is the one that we don't have as much trouble

with today as they did back then. Writing materials are more common. We have teleprompters. We have

cue cards and stuff. Back then, if you wanted to give a speech, you needed to remember every

single piece of it. So memory is that piece, and then the last is delivery, how well you do that thing

on stage that you want to do. So what I'll be talking about today is invention. So coming up

with stuff to say. It's hard. It's hard to think about stuff to say. Yeah, it's one of the hardest

pieces. I feel like this is one of the most difficult if you're kind of naturally just sort of a ham.

Like if you can get up and talk and you get up on stage and you're, you know, one of those guys,

then this is the hardest piece for you. Getting up on stage is not that scary. But for other folks,

it's the stage bit that's the scariest. So, thinking of stuff to say, they use these things

called topics. And what they mean is, like,

locations. They're more like bus stops for the brain to go to to think about your topic. And there's

special topics, depending on what kind of speech you're giving, but there's common topics to all

kinds of speeches. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. They're called the common topics. So would this be something that I would do, if I was,

if I was tasked with giving a speech, would this be something that I would do while I was writing

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