User:Bkissinger04/Rhetoric

Rhetoric (/ˈrɛtərɪk/) is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic – see Martianus Capella), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Taking place in Athens in the early fifth century, the demos "the people" created "a strategy for effectively talking to other people in juries, forums, and the senate" (keith, 6). Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies; he calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians, statesmen, and poets as it is the most used form of communication between person to person.

Classical philosophers believed quite the contrary: the skilled use of rhetoric was essential to the discovery of truths, because it provided the means of ordering and clarifying arguments giving everyone an opportunity to voice their opinions.

Rhetorical strategies are the efforts made by authors to persuade or inform their readers. Rhetorical strategies are employed by writers and refer to the different ways they can persuade the reader. According to Gray, there are various argument strategies used in writing. He describes four of these as argument from analogy, argument from absurdity, thought experiments, and inference to the best explanation. An example of these strategies include ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos.


 * Andresen, Volker. Speak Well in Public – 10 Steps to Succeed. ISBN 1-4563-1026-7.
 * Connors, Robert, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, eds. Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Festschrift in Honor of Edward P. J. Corbett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984.
 * Duffy, Bernard K. and Richard Leeman. eds. American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005). ISBN 0-313-32790-4
 * Cox, Leonard. The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke at Project Gutenberg.
 * Kieth, William M. and Lundberg Christian O. The Essential Guide to Rhetoric. Boston, MA 2018
 * Garver, Eugene. Aristotle's Rhetoric: On Art of Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-226-28425-5
 * Gunderson, Erik. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009.
 * Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971.