Reading Response 10-23-14:

Quintilian possessed the highest degree of sophistication. He wrote Institutes of Oratory that guided the person from birth to death on becoming a great speaker. He spoke on how early one can be influenced advising to carefully pick the child’s surroundings. He even goes into detail into talking about how important your appearance is. This is a good point because an audience sees an orator who is properly/well-dressed credible in most cases. He also believes that being a good person/citizen is a must. I think that he has a well thought out definition of rhetoric and to compliment it he explains the two questions rhetoric answers (indefinite and definite), three bases, the four proofs, and loci.

Reflective Tag:

There are a lot of things that are important in this section but one thing that I learned and also felt was important was the appearance. Appearance meaning the how respectable you dress and the types of gestures you make. I think that everyone who read this can probably think of one type of scenario in real life where this may have been the case for the good or bad. I have learned how Quintilian, being born about 2000 years ago, shares a lot of similar problems to the speakers today. This is important because people of rhetoric need to be exposed of our weaknesses of our speech. What we could all take away from this is everyone needs to have a guide like his Institute of Oratory therefore putting you in the right positions to be a great orator.