Editing Elocution (section)

==History==
In Western classical [[rhetoric]], elocution was one of the five core disciplines of [[Pronuntiatio|pronunciation]], which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper [[diction]], but on the proper use of gestures, stance, and dress. There was a movement in the eighteenth century to standardize English writing and speaking and elocution was a part of this movement, with the help of Sheridan and Walker.<ref name="spoel2001">{{Cite journal|last=Spoel|first=Philippa|date=Winter 2001|title=Rereading the Elocutionists: The Rhetoric of Thomas Sheridan's A Course of Lectures on Elocution and John Walker's Elements of Elocution |journal=Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric|volume=19|issue=1 |pages=49–91|doi=10.1525/rh.2001.19.1.49 |jstor=10.1525/rh.2001.19.1.49 |s2cid=170245236 }}</ref> (Another area of rhetoric, [[elocutio]], was unrelated to ''elocution'' and, instead, concerned the style of writing proper to discourse.)

Elocution emerged as a formal discipline during the eighteenth century. One of its important figures was [[Thomas Sheridan (actor)|Thomas Sheridan]], actor and father of [[Richard Brinsley Sheridan]]. Thomas Sheridan's lectures on elocution, collected in ''Lectures on Elocution'' (1762) and his ''Lectures on Reading'' (1775), provided directions for marking and reading aloud passages from literature. Another actor, [[John Walker (lexicographer)|John Walker]], published his two-volume ''Elements of Elocution'' in 1781, which provided detailed instruction on voice control, gestures, pronunciation, and emphasis. Sheridan had a lot of ground to cover with having to be one of the first to establish great ideas about this subject, speaking more vaguely on subjects, but promising to explain them further. While Walker's approach was an attempt to put in place rules and a system on the correct form of elocution. 

One reason these books gained traction was that both authors took a scientific approach and made rhetorically-built arguments in a time period where manual-styled, scientific, how-to books were popular.<ref name="spoel2001" /> Including these were "over four hundred editions" of grammar and "two hundred fifteen editions" of dictionary books that became available to the public in the 1700s, "five times more ... after 1750" than prior.<ref name="spoel2001" /> This was because education held a heavier weight in social status so therefore upper-class, higher educated people were reading these books as well as whoever else wanted to have the appearance of more gentleman or lady-like class than they may have been from.<ref name="abbott2020">{{Cite journal|last=Abbott|first=Don Paul|date=27 Jan 2020|title="The Artful Woman": Mrs. Ellis and the Domestication of Elocution |journal=Rhetoric Review|volume=39|pages=1–15 |doi=10.1080/07350198.2019.1690373 |s2cid=213968732 }}</ref>

With the publication of these works and similar ones, elocution gained wider public interest. While training on proper speaking had been an important part of private education for many centuries, the rise in the nineteenth century of a middle class in Western countries (and the corresponding rise of public education) led to great interest in the teaching of elocution, and it became a staple of the school curriculum. American students of elocution drew selections from what were popularly deemed "Speakers." By the end of the century, several Speaker texts circulated throughout the United States, including McGuffey's ''New Juvenile Speaker'', the ''Manual of Elocution and Reading'', the ''Star Speaker'', and the popular ''Delsarte Speaker''. Some of these texts even included pictorial depictions of body movements and gestures to augment written descriptions.{{Citation needed|date=July 2021}}

The era of the elocution movement, defined by the likes of Sheridan and Walker, evolved in the early and mid-1800s into what is called the scientific movement of elocution, defined in the early period by James Rush's ''The Philosophy of the Human Voice'' (1827) and [[Richard Whately]]'s ''Elements of Rhetoric'' (1828), and in the later period by [[Alexander Melville Bell]]'s ''A New Elucidation of Principles of Elocution'' (1849) and ''Visible Speech'' (1867).

The once-popular female-dominated genre of elocution set to musical accompaniment in the United States is the subject of a 2017 book by [[Marian Wilson Kimber]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kimber |first1=Marian Wilson |title=The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word |date=2017 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |location=Urbana |isbn=978-0-252-09915-1}}</ref>

In a 2020 article, "'The Artful Woman': Mrs. Ellis and the Domestication of Elocution", Don Paul Abbott writes about [[Sarah Stickney Ellis]] and her work ''Young Ladies Reader'' (1845) and its impact on women's lives in the nineteenth century. Ellis' work, as well as others that were published around the same time, had compilations of other authors' works.<ref name="abbott2020" /> Ellis had intended her work to be for other women, therefore she compiled a number of women's writings in her work, as did other authors more or less dependent on specific ones.<ref name="abbott2020" /> This was still during a time when it was well believed that women and men lived in "separate spheres".<ref name="abbott2020" /> 

Ellis did not go the lengths that Sheridan and Walker did when it came to developing theories and rules for elocution but she made it clear through her writing that she believed that the spoken word was powerful and mastering it "deserves the attention" of ladies all around.<ref name="abbott2020" /> She comes to this idea of "The Artful Woman", a concept of a lady who is able to persuade others, specifically mentioning her husband. According to Abbott, Ellis believes that she had empowered women in their own sphere, so much so he argues in his journal article that it is possible she delayed women stepping "from the parlor to the podium".<ref name="abbott2020" />