Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning 'the right or critical moment'. In modern Greek, kairos also means 'weather' or 'time'.
Rhetorical criticism analyzes the symbolic artifacts of discourse—the words, phrases, images, gestures, performances, texts, films, etc. that people use to communicate. Rhetorical analysis shows how the artifacts work, how well they work, and how the artifacts, as discourse, inform and instruct, entertain and arouse, and convince and persuade the audience; as such, discourse includes the possibility of morally improving the reader, the viewer, and the listener. Rhetorical criticism studies and analyzes the purpose of the words, sights, and sounds that are the symbolic artifacts used for communications among people.
Procatalepsis, also called prolepsis or prebuttal, is a figure of speech in which the speaker raises an objection to their own argument and then immediately answers it. By doing so, the speaker hopes to strengthen the argument by dealing with possible counterarguments before the audience can raise them.
Pathos appeals to the emotions and ideals of the audience and elicits feelings that already reside in them. Pathos is a term most used often in rhetoric, as well as in literature, film and other narrative art.
Genre studies is an academic subject which studies genre theory as a branch of general critical theory in several different fields, including art, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies.
Inventio, one of the five canons of rhetoric, is the method used for the discovery of arguments in Western rhetoric and comes from the Latin word, meaning "invention" or "discovery". Inventio is the central, indispensable canon of rhetoric, and traditionally means a systematic search for arguments.
Memoria was the term for aspects involving memory in Western classical rhetoric. The word is Latin, and can be translated as "memory".
A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals."
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the 20th century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended to serve as a quick reference rather than an in-depth discussion. For more information, click the terms.
The epideictic oratory, also called ceremonial oratory, or praise-and-blame rhetoric, is one of the three branches, or "species" (eidē), of rhetoric as outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric, to be used to praise or blame during ceremonies.
The third persona is the implied audience which is not present in, or is excluded from, rhetorical communication. This conception of the Third Persona relates to the First Persona, the "I" in discourse, and the second persona, the "you" in discourse. Third Persona is "the 'it' that is not present, that is objectified in a way that 'you' and 'I' are not." Third Persona, as a theory, seeks to define and critique the rules of rhetoric, to further consider how we talk about what we talk about—the discourse of discourse—and who is affected by that discourse. The concept of the third persona encourages examination of who is implicitly excluded from a discourse, why they are excluded, and what this can tell us about how that discourse participates in larger networks of social or political power.
Neo-Aristotelianism is a view of literature and rhetorical criticism propagated by the Chicago School — Ronald S. Crane, Elder Olson, Richard McKeon, Wayne Booth, and others — which means:
"A view of literature and criticism which takes a pluralistic attitude toward the history of literature and seeks to view literary works and critical theories intrinsically."
A rhetorical situation is an event that consists of an issue, an audience, and a set of constraints. A rhetorical situation arises from a given context or exigence. An article by Lloyd Bitzer introduced the model of the rhetorical situation in 1968, which was later challenged and modified by Richard E. Vatz (1973) and Scott Consigny (1974). More recent scholarship has further redefined the model to include more expansive views of rhetorical operations and ecologies.
New rhetoric is an interdisciplinary field approaching for the broadening of classical rhetorical canon.
Constitutive rhetoric is a theory of discourse devised by James Boyd White about the capacity of language or symbols to create a collective identity for an audience, especially by means of condensation symbols, literature, and narratives. Such discourse often demands that action be taken to reinforce the identity and the beliefs of that identity. White explains that it denotes "the art of constituting character, community and culture in language."
Ethopoeia (ee-tho-po-EE-ya) is the ancient Greek term for the creation of a character. Ethopoeia was a technique used by early students of rhetoric in order to create a successful speech or oration by impersonating a subject or client. Ethopoeia contains elements of both ethos and pathos and this is noticeable in the three divisions of ethopoeia. These three divisions are pathetical, ethical and mixed. It is essential to impersonation, one of the fourteen progymnasmata exercises created for the early schools of rhetoric.
Identification is a key theme in the works of Kenneth Burke as part of the New Rhetoric movement. Contemporary rhetoric focuses on cultural contexts and general structures of rhetoric structures. Burke was a notable contemporary U.S. rhetorician who made major contributions to the rhetoric of identification. James A. Herrick describes one of Burke's foundational ideas with identification is that “rhetoric makes human unity possible, that language use is symbolic action, and that rhetoric is symbolic inducement.” For Burke, words were Terministic screens through which people see the world and interact with each other. Herrick, further explains that identification in rhetoric is crucial to persuasion, and thus to cooperation, consensus, compromise, and action. Burke believed that the most serious human problem was to be alienated or separated, and rhetoric was to be that problem's only solution. Much of his work was based on bringing people back together. However, Burke argues that “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division; Identification is compensatory to division.” Rhetoric's goal, in regards to identification, is to bring people together of whom have been separated by estrangement or opposition. Those who feel isolated or separate from others may identify joint interests with others or become part of an institution -- "‘Belonging’ in this sense is rhetoric."
In argumentation theory, an argumentation scheme or argument scheme is a template that represents a common type of argument used in ordinary conversation. Many different argumentation schemes have been identified. Each one has a name and presents a type of connection between premises and a conclusion in an argument, and this connection is expressed as a rule of inference. Argumentation schemes can include inferences based on different types of reasoning—deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, etc.
