Hugh Blair, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Criticism and composition are not a retreat from eloquence but its foundation. A man who cannot judge what makes a period clear or an image just will not speak well when the occasion comes, and most educated men will write far more often than they will address an assembly.123
By putting our sentiments into words, we always conceive them more distinctly. Every one who has the slightest acquaintance with composition knows, that when he expresses himself ill on any subject, when his arrangement is loose, and his sentences become feeble, the defects of his style can, al- most on every occasion, be traced back to his indistinct conception of the subject: so close is the connexion between…Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
Even the commoa people are better judges of argu meat and good sense, than we sometimes think them; and upon any question of business, a plain man, who speaks to the point without art, will generally prevail over the most artful speaker, who deals in flowers and ornament, rather than in reasoning.Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
The attention paid to it may, indeed, be assumed as one mark of the progress of society towards its most improved period. For, accord- ing as society improves and flourishes, men acquire more influence over one another by means of reasoning and discourse; and in pro- portion as that influence is felt to enlarge, it must follow, as a natu- ral consequence, that they will bestow more care upon the methods B 9 10…Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
The organizing decision of the course, made deliberately and defended in the opening lecture.