David
summary of Quintillian focused heavily on goodness. Clearly goodness back then
is not synonymous with goodness today.
David notes that Quintilian “believes that audiences will believe
virtuous people more readily and more fully than others, particularly when
there is great uncertainty re: a topic or when opinions are divided.” I find
this to be true. Credibility is a hug factor in believability – credibility can
be divided between expert knowledge and unbiased. Being unbiased is basically
being good – in so much as that you let the facts speak for themselves and you
aren’t driving a personally profitable agenda.
One of
David’s questions asked “Do you believe that someone who uses language
eloquently and effectively (eloquentia perfecta) is a good person?” He
basically goes on to provide an excellent example in his second question citing
Hitler.
I also
think that using language eloquently and effectively is completely uncoupled
from goodness. This directly relates to Angela’s discussion of Cicero’s De
Oratore – where he asks us to separate the content from the style. This is very
interesting to me for a variety of reasons. In class I remember we mentioned
content <the words> and how they can be visually manipulated via
cascading style sheets for websites, or marked up with XML for electronic
publishing. This also bleeds into the topic on my final paper on English Second
Language authors. They are undoubtedly content matter experts – but how they
style language is often less than optimal for native speakers. So are ESL
authors less good? They are certainly less skilled at persuading in English –
but this does not correlate at all with them conducting inferior science. So does
Quintilian’s goodness theory apply in this context? I personally believe the theory is situationally
relevant to that time and place – but is not timeless or universally applicable.
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