I’m getting more and more convinced that the study of rhetoric has something to offer blogging, and more generally information retrieval. It seems to hit all the right notes: audience attention, structure, style, mood, content, authority. Even relevance. I suspect I’ll be posting a lot more on this but for the moment, here is Cicero’s five-part theory of rhetoric.

Inventio
Decide what you want to say. Think before you speak. (Don’t post gibberish)

Dispositio
Decide how you’re going to structure your message. The Classical way of structuring things had the following six steps.

1) Get the audience’s attention (headlines etc)
2) Tell them what you’re going to talk about (make sure the opening para is clear)
3) Tell them how you plan to treat the theme
4) Give the audience the content “hit”, one step at a time
5) Restate what you’ve said in brief
6) Conclude

[Reminiscent of journalism skills?]

Elocutio
The style in which you get your message across: metaphors, figures of speech etc. These styles were divided into three basic “either or”s:

1) Bucolic or humble
2) Didactic or moderate
3) Sublime or noble

Memoria
[more for speech giving]
Remember what you’re going to say. The more it’s internalised, the more natural it’s going to sound

Pronunciatio
How you come across. For the orator, whether you’re wooden or a bundle of energy. {So for the blogger, whether you write short notes, long rambling entries, how you “sound” when being read)