One of the seven classical liberal arts, rhetoric – from the Greek rhetor, “speaker” – is the art of speaking. Traditionally, rhetoric was addressed as “the art of speaking” in a limited sense, as in the art of delivering a persuasive public oration. More recently, rhetoric has come to be seen as “the art of speaking” in a more general sense, here “speaking” understood in the sense of “communication,” including the skills of thinking, reading, and writing. 

Broadly conceived, therefore, there are two branches of rhetoric, the practical (which is classical) and the theoretical (which is modern). Practical rhetoric is about persuasion; rhetorical theory is about interpretation. In other words, practical rhetoric is about writing texts, while rhetorical theory is about reading texts. Practical rhetoric is about writing your own text, structuring it, communicating an idea. Rhetorical theory is about reading someone else’s text, making sense of it, interpreting it.

Practical Rhetoric

In the tradition of Aristotle, practical rhetoric is largely about strategies for effective argumentation. For example, Aristotle identified two key features of persuasion: the enthymeme and the example.

An enthymeme is a deduction. It is an informally stated syllogism. A syllogism is a chain of logical reasoning, such as: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. An enthymeme is a syllogism that, for the sake of concision and eloquence, drops a premise that is probably true because few would debate it: Being a man, Socrates is mortal.

An example is an induction. It is the use of a clear and concrete instance of an argument to demonstrate that argument. As such, examples are not just particular information and analyses. They are information and analysis in a certain direction – that is, in support of an argument. Aristotle’s example of examples is that the argument that a ruler who surrounds himself with bodyguards is planning to do terrible things is supported by the examples of Dionysius, who asked for a bodyguard while scheming to make himself a despot; and Peisistratus, who did the same; and Theagenes, who did as well. Since examples demonstrate arguments, one must know one’s argument before one can know what examples to use. Facts and information that aren’t serving an argument are just random data floating in space, and it is important to remember that the facts and analyses that led you to your argument may not necessarily be the best information and analyses to communicate that argument.

In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, some other key distinctions include the three modes of persuasion, the three kinds of oratory, and the five parts of an oratory.

There are three modes of persuasion – logos, ethos, and pathos:

• Logos refers to the appeal of an argument based on its logical consistency.
• Ethos refers to the speaker’s ability to present him- or herself as a credible authority.
• Pathos refers to the speaker’s ability to rouse emotions in his audience that influence their willingness to accept his or her argument.

Logos relates to the argument itself while ethos relates to the disposition of the speaker and pathos to the disposition of the audience. Aristotle said that one’s ethos is achieved by what one says, not by the attitude of the audience before one’s speech begins. In other words, you establish credibility not by being a recognized expert but by conducting yourself in a way that grants you authority.

There are three kinds of oratory – forensic, deliberative, and epideictic:

• A forensic argument is legal.
• A deliberative argument is political.
• And an epideictic argument is ethical.

For each kind of oratory, Aristotle attached (1) a binary of themes, (2) a time period, and (3) an end:

• A forensic argument is (1) about accusation and defense, (2) with reference to the past, and (3) in the service of justice.
• A deliberative argument is (1) about exhortation and dehortation, (2) with reference to the future, and (3) about expediency.
• An epideictic argument is (1) about praise and blame, (2) with reference to the present, and (3) in the service of honor.

According to Aristotle, there are four parts of oratory:

(1)    the prooemium or introduction;

(2)    the prosthesis, which is a statement of the proposition to be argued;

(3)    the pistis, which is the proof of the statement;

(4)    the epilogue or conclusion.

You might note that these parts of oratory are roughly analogous to the commonly taught three-part structure of the modern essay: Introduction (which includes a thesis), Body, and Conclusion.

Rhetorical Theory

In the tradition of Aristotle, practical rhetoric is about the proper adornment of truth such that truth is attractive and persuasive. In this view, rhetoric is an art which expresses or packages the knowledge derived from philosophy, which is not an art but a science. Truth exists out there, can be scientifically known, and rhetoric is the art of communicating truth.

Rhetorical theory is a more modern development. It makes great use of some tenets of practical rhetoric while rejecting other tenets out of hand. Specifically, it makes use of the notion that we humans can and do package our ideas in ways that attempt to make them appealing to others, but rhetorical theory reconfigures the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. In this view, it is not the case that philosophy is a science that searches for truth and rhetoric is an art that searches for ways to express the truths of philosophy. Instead, from the perspective of rhetorical theory, the fact of expression is the only truth, a view of life summarized in the expression veratum factum, “truth is made.” Reality may exist somewhere out there, but truth – understood as the reliable description of reality – does not. In this sense, truth is not real. Truth is invented by humans seeking to explain reality, explanations that, in their situatedness, are necessarily circumstantial, coming as they do from a particular perspective. All that can be known with certainty is that humans use language. In this view, philosophy is an art. It is not the way to a truth that needs to be properly packaged; philosophy is itself packaging.

As such, rhetorical theory is about contingency. It is closely bound up with the notion that all thoughts and actions are situated. In other words, every idea and every event emerges in the context of circumstances that therefore condition its emergence. Stated as such, this notion is obvious and benign, but, if true, then all meaning is circumstantial. Both acts of textual composition and acts of textual interpretation – both the ways we read texts and the ways we write them – are situated among circumstances that condition those actions. It is to the circumstantial aspects of action that rhetorical theory directs its attention.

If practical rhetoric is prescriptive, detailing (as it does) the means of effective persuasion, rhetorical theory is descriptive, attending to the forms of all communication, whether persuasive or not.

Rhetorical theory is based on the idea of textuality – that is, the idea that the world is full of texts, or things we humans have made (whether those things are material objects or immaterial events), and we can interpret those “texts” in the same way that we interpret “texts” more traditionally understood (as in works of literature). This approach is a new and exciting field in rhetorical theory. It asks how the things we create, the actions we perform, and the cultures we develop exhibit forms of – metaphorically speaking – rhetorical devices.

In short, rhetorical theory can be thought of as the philosophy of communication. It invovles the study and mastery of interpretation and argumentation. It attends not to what we think and say but to how we think and speak.

Rhetorical theory does not belong to any one discipline. It is an “interdiscipline,” because all disciplines use rhetoric to package the truths of that discipline.