Delivery in the 21st Century
Hanako Boucher
Without delivery, I’d argue that the rest of the canons mean nothing. If you disconnect from your audience during delivery, and they don’t understand your perfectly-structured points, and your flawlessly stylized ideas don’t land as intended, then none of it matters. On the flip side, good delivery can make the most incohesive and flawed argument somehow sound appealing.
What constitutes a good delivery though? In ancient times, when delivery could only apply to the way you orally delivered the argument to your audience, there was no question about it — you had to speak well, with the proper gestures and tone to appeal to your intended audience. Yet as times have changed, more and more rhetoric is being delivered in writing, and, even further, multimedia is now a popular rhetorical genre to utilize. These genres arguably make delivery even more crucial to the rhetorical canons.
At least orally, one can adjust their delivery in real time, based off of audience reaction, whereas in writing or with something passively delivered to an audience, with no direct interaction between the original rhetor and their captive gallery, the rhetorical delivery has to be nearly flawless on the first go. Yet in the 21st century, we’ve also started having this issue with oral delivery.
Writing and multimedia are circulated much more easily on the internet, so any formal oral delivery nowadays is usually recorded, so that it can enter that same information sphere. Oral delivery rarely only stays in the physical realm nowadays; oral delivery’s presence is so often digitized now because it will have further impact that way. So, while oral delivery maintains the power to be changed in real time, any mistakes made in that initial present moment are oftentimes recorded for future analysis. Anything that falls flat or just otherwise comes across wrong will be scrutinized and clearly visible, no longer to be forgotten with your initial audience — your audience only grows and grows once your rhetoric is online.
In the modern day, delivery is more crucial than ever, because it is what will be fixated on once it enters the digital realm. Most rhetorical discourse occurs in this realm, and if the delivery of a rhetorical argument is heavily flawed, then it is doubtful that people will find that rhetoric worthy enough to engage with at all.
