While this was not my first reading of a Plato text, ( I read The Republic at some point in my educational career) it was the first time I had read anything dealing with his ideas of rhetoric and oratory skills. Phaedrus is a great text for anybody beginning studies in the field of Rhetoric and Composition; Plato lays out in this text the ground rules for both learning Rhetoric and teaching composition and rhetoric in a classroom. While I must say that Lysias’ discourse on love was a bit dense for me to sit through, I have gained quite a bit of good material from the discussion between Socrates and Phaedrus in which they dissect Lysias’ speech and Socrates’ impromptu speech. What follows is a brief summary of the text and the concept that stood out the most to me. (Keep in mind that this is not the only concept in the text, but I want to keep this post under 2000 words, so I’m sticking to one specific concept and a generalizati0n).
First, a brief rundown of the most important points in the text (according to my annotations)

• Phaedro reads Lysias’ argument that a man is better off choosing a friend than a lover since a friend will keep your best interest in mind while a lover only wants you to be happy
• Socrates presents his argument for the friend who will want you to better yourself as opposed to the lover who wants to keep you as you are.
• Discussion of good and bad speech writing
  • Persuasion depends on the audience
  • cannot have effective persuasion without truth and you must know the truth before beginning the speech.
• the rhetor must know which words are ambiguous and define them with specifics in terms of how they will be used in the speech
• there must be specific material and organization in an effective speech
• Procedures to speech writing
  • make point of what the speech is about
  • divide speech into specific parts
    • “right arm, left arm” (more below)
      • topic must be adequately proportioned
• order of speech or essay
  • preamble
  • exposition
    • direct evidence
    • indirect evidence
    • probabilities
    • proof
    • supplementary proof
  • conclusion
• too many teach fractions of rhetoric and present it as the full art
• necessary for the rhetor to know the types of soul in order to move audience appropriately
• importance of ethos of speaker
• written words need author’s ethos to support itself

For those of us who teach composition, this is not much more than a refresher in the skills we teach daily to our students. However, I did find one specific Plato teaching that works well with the development of argumentative writing in the classroom. I’m certain I’ll be getting more out of this text when we cover it in class, so check back then for our lively discussion summary.

Here is the part of my blog that I’m going to deem the “point and application” (I”ll do this as often as I can depending on what I come across in the reading).

Point: Plato writes “any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and th whole work” (510).

Application: As I so desperately seek to teach the importance of structure to my composition students, I never seem to come up with an idea that adequately details both how to consider the structure of an argument as well as provide them with an example that will remain with them. Voila! All I needed to do was consult the ancient Greeks (who would have thought that!). Eureka! Now I know exactly what I need to do. In Plato’s idea, it becomes clear that the head and feet form the introduction and conclusion while the body itself is comprised of arms and leg, which immediately serve as the body of the essay. While my first thought was that this may not amuse (and therefore stick with) my students, I soon realized that if I set the stage for multiple arguments and counterarguments, I could quickly make a point in class by making each a set of arms and legs. Each arm serves as a specific point to make in the argument, so I could begin by drawing my hideous stick figure on the board and adding extra arms on either side to show them how each argument alone stands in the essay. For counterarguments, we need legs and since the we, as humans, have two arms and two legs then our creature’s arms must be equivalent to his legs. This way we see how each arm corresponds to a specific leg and how that specific leg directly supports the arm.

Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington. Plato: Collected Dialogues. NJ, Princeton: 1989.