Originally, the progymnasmata was used in Ancient Greece to imbue students with the knowledge they needed to become effective orators. It consisted of fourteen specific exercises:

1. fable
2. tale
3. saying
4. proverb
5. refutation
6. confirmation
7. commonplace
8. encomium
9. invective
10. comparison
11. characterization
12. description
13. thesis
14. law

Now, it is easy to see how these exercises build upon one another in difficulty, but they were designed to do much more than that. Students began with these exercises at home working with a private tutor (about the equivalent age of grammar school students) and worked with the exercises through their college years. But it’s much more difficult than it looks; students were not just told to write a fable and then left to write that (as some teachers tend to do in this day and age), but it was rather a process that built slowly to the student’s writing of fable.

First, the student was presented with the genre which had to then be named, defined and divided into subtypes by the student. This section of the assignment allowed students to gain a better grasp on the genre they were working with (such as fable).

Once the student had a grasp on the full span of this genre, they were provided with an “art” for invention of this genre to study. Much as today’s students are taught clustering, mapping and outlining, ancient scholars were taught ways to invent specifically for the genre they were working with.

Once students had a grasp on the genre and the invention, they were taught criteria for evaluating sample productions of the genre. Here, in my opinion, lies the beginning of the most important steps of the progymnasmata. Students need to comprehend the aspects of good writing in any genre, so for me, this is one of the most important steps in the process.

After teaching students how to analyze genre writing to determine good from bad examples, students were provided with a model from the genre they were working with.So, continuing with the fable genre, we could say that students were assigned a reading of one of Aesop’s fables. With this model, students studied the model through a variety of exercises including:

1. Reading
2. Paraphrasing
3. Transliteration (translating into a second language)
4. Memorization and recitation
5. Correction of the paraphrasing and recitation

Only once the students could prove their understanding of the model and demonstrate their ability to complete the exercises were the students allowed to delve into writing their own version of the genre.

So, the key to these exercises was not merely to have students write within the genre, but to have students pay close attention to the details and nuances of the genre so that each genre made a lasting impression on their rhetorical and oratory abilities.

Again, special thanks to the BYU Silva Rhetoricae and J. David Fleming’s “The Very Idea of a Progymnasmata”