Plain SpeakingN-05 · Topic
How these skills were taught
From classical rhetoric through elocution and composition to the plain-language movement.
For most of the history of formal education, speaking well was the subject rather than a supplement to it. Rhetoric sat alongside grammar and logic as one of the three foundational arts, and a student's progress was measured by their ability to compose and deliver an argument out loud. Writing was, for centuries, taught as a preparation for speech rather than as an end in itself.
This topic follows what happened to that inheritance: how it narrowed into elocution and drill, how composition displaced declamation, and how a twentieth-century reaction against official prose produced the plain-language guidance that most institutions now at least claim to follow.
Notes in and around this topic
- N-12How speaking and writing were taught
Rhetoric, elocution, composition and the plain-language reaction: how instruction in speech and writing shifted.
- N-10Plain writing
Writing that can be understood on one pass, and why long sentences are usually a symptom rather than a style.
- N-11Presenting without slides
What a room is actually doing while you talk, and how to build twenty minutes that hold together.
- N-06How speech develops in childhood
The ordinary sequence from babbling to sentences, and why comprehension always runs ahead of speech.