A Brief Overview of

Rhetoric

Rhetoric can be used asboth analytic and productive art

Analytic → Analysis

Heuristic → Production

Definitions

Aristotle: Rhetoric is “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion.”

Cicero:  “Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery."  Rhetoric is "speech designed to persuade.”

Quintilian:  “Rhetoric is the art of speaking well" or "...a good person speaking well.”

Definitions

Kenneth Burke: "The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.“

Lloyd Bitzer: "...rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.“

Gerard A. Hauser: "Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention."

Characteristics of rhetorical discourse

1. Planned

2. Adapted to an audience

3. Shaped by human motives

4. Responsive to a situation

5. Persuasion-seeking

6. Concerned with contingent issues

Social functions of the art of rhetoric

1. Rhetoric tests ideas

2. Rhetoric assists advocacy

3. Rhetoric distributes power

4. Rhetoric discovers facts

5. Rhetoric shapes knowledge

6. Rhetoric builds community