Public speaking, also called oratory, is the act or skill of delivering speeches on a subject before a live audience. Public speaking has played an important cultural role in human history.
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.
A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.
Gorgias was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.
On the Sublime is a Roman-era Greek work of literary criticism dated to the 1st century C.E. Its author is unknown, but is conventionally referred to as Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus. It is regarded as a classic work on aesthetics and the effects of good writing. The treatise highlights examples of good and bad writing from the previous millennium, focusing particularly on what may lead to the sublime.
Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone as well as the idea and practice of effective speech and its forms. It stems from the idea that while communication is symbolic, sounds are final and compelling.
In religious studies, homiletics is the application of the general principles of rhetoric to the specific art of public preaching. One who practices or studies homiletics may be called a homilist, or more simply, a preacher.
Pathos appeals to the emotions and ideals of the audience and elicits feelings that already reside in them. Pathos is a term used most often in rhetoric, as well as in literature, film and other narrative art.
Elocutio is a Latin term for the mastery of rhetorical devices and figures of speech in Western classical rhetoric. Elocutio or style is the third of the five canons of classical rhetoric that concern the craft and delivery of speeches and writing.
Pronuntiatio was the discipline of delivering speeches in Western classical rhetoric. It is one of the five canons of classical rhetoric that concern the crafting and delivery of speeches. In literature the equivalent of ancient pronuntiatio is the recitation of epics.
The term composition as it refers to writing, can describe authors' decisions about, processes for designing, and sometimes the final product of, a composed linguistic work. In original use, it tended to describe practices concerning the development of oratorical performances, and eventually essays, narratives, or genres of imaginative literature, but since the mid-20th century emergence of the field of composition studies, its use has broadened to apply to any composed work: print or digital, alphanumeric or multimodal. As such, the composition of linguistic works goes beyond the exclusivity of written and oral documents to visual and digital arenas.
Pro-war rhetoric is rhetoric or propaganda designed to convince its audience that war is necessary. The two main analytical approaches to pro-war rhetoric were founded by Ronald Reid, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Robert Ivie, a professor of Rhetoric and Public Communication and Culture at Indiana University (Bloomington). Reid's framework originated from inductively studying propaganda. Ivie uses a deductive approach based on the work of Kenneth Burke, claiming that "a people strongly committed to the ideal of peace, but simultaneously faced with the reality of war, must believe that the fault for any such disruption of their ideal lies with others".
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.
De Oratore is a dialogue written by Cicero in 55 BC. It is set in 91 BC, when Lucius Licinius Crassus dies, just before the Social War and the civil war between Marius and Sulla, during which Marcus Antonius (orator), the other great orator of this dialogue, dies. During this year, the author faces a difficult political situation: after his return from exile in Dyrrachium, his house was destroyed by the gangs of Clodius in a time when violence was common. This was intertwined with the street politics of Rome.
De doctrina Christiana is a theological text written by Augustine of Hippo. It consists of four books that describe how to interpret and teach the Scriptures. The first three of these books were published in 397 and the fourth added in 426. By writing this text, Augustine set three tasks for Christian teachers and preachers: to discover the truth in the contents of the Scriptures, to teach the truth from the Scriptures, and to defend scriptural truth when it was attacked.
Rhetorical stance refers to the deliberate choices made by a communicator in shaping and presenting their message. It encompasses the strategic decisions regarding language, style, and tone that are employed to achieve a specific communicative purpose. This concept is deeply rooted in rhetorical theory and is a fundamental aspect of effective communication across various disciplines, including literature, public speaking, and academic writing.
In philosophy, lexis is a complete group of words in a language, vocabulary, the total set of all words in a language, and all words that have meaning or a function in grammar.
Declamation is an artistic form of public speaking. It is a dramatic oration designed to express through articulation, emphasis and gesture the full sense of the text being conveyed.
Eloquentia perfecta, a tradition of the Society of Jesus, is a value of Jesuit rhetoric that revolves around cultivating a person as a whole, as one learns to speak and write for the common good. Eloquentia perfecta is a Latin term which means "perfect eloquence". The term connotes values of eloquent expression and action for the common good. For Jesuits, the term eloquentia perfecta was understood as the joining of knowledge and wisdom with virtue and morality.
