What's the Orator Personality Based On?

A Word About My Methods

I spent some time studying Carl Jung and the authors of the Meyers-Briggs personality test, as well as other personality experts, and have used some of their thinking in putting together my own categories. The main difference is that while your actual personality can help you understand the type of orator you should be, in rhetoric you can project a different  personality as long as it’s believable. For example, if Meyers-Briggs calls you an introvert, that does not doom you to dwelling in a cave and living quietly on insects.  (Even Meyers-Briggs wouldn’t say that.) So feel free to take the Meyers-Briggs test. 

The three options you can click on have to do with the three basic forms of communication, according to ancient Rome’s greatest orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero: to entertain, to teach, and to manipulate (“delight, instruct, and persuade”  in Cicero’s own words). Look at the kinds of language you most love to use—the words that you take most pride in saying. Do those words (1) delight people? Tell them (2) what they should know to feel better or do better in their own lives? Or (3) get people to work together—or with you—to accomplish something?