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Plato's Clever Butcher

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2. Disposition: “What arrangement will make the most sense?”
Make an assertion, support it with evidence, reasoning and an illustration if necessary, make a transition and move on to your next point. One must balance elaborating points with overloading the audience.

Most textbooks go on at length here regarding spatial, versus logical, versus chronological patterns of organization. I generally just teach Plato’s “clever butcher” analogy. Plato said that a clumsy butcher takes a chicken and hacks it all to pieces; makes a mess of the whole thing. A clever butcher, on the other hand, realizes that the chicken has natural divisions, called joints, and uses those to cleanly divide the chicken. So, when organizing a speech, I just tell my students

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