Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing well, that is, of giving language enough effectiveness to persuade, move or delight its audience. The word comes from the Greek rhetorikè (téchne), and its classical foundations are usually traced to ancient Greece, where it was understood as the technique of expressing oneself appropriately in order to win the listener's assent. In the Latin tradition it was summed up as ars bene dicendi, the art of speaking well.

For centuries it was one of the seven liberal arts that formed the basis of preparatory studies in the first universities, alongside grammar, dialectic, arithmetic, music, astronomy and geometry. Aristotle defined it as the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion, and placed it between logic and the ethical branch of politics. His three audience appeals, logos, pathos and ethos, remain a starting point for its study. Later, the stages of developing a speech were codified as invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery.

Classical authors debated its scope. Plato criticised it for flattering the masses and for being used to deceive rather than to discover the truth, while the Sophists, such as Gorgias, argued that a skilled speaker could speak convincingly on any subject. Today rhetoric is studied in advertising, politics, journalism, law, education and science, and even in images and digital media, where figures such as metaphor and metonymy are analysed. Its reach is debated between those who confine it to public discourse and those who regard it as a dimension of all human communication.