Can rhetoric be useful and ethical, or is rhetoric at its most basic level an act of manipulation?

Our first few readings and classes have discussed the beginnings of rhetoric and a general sense of the term rhetoric, including the historical roots of the conflict over the nature and value of rhetoric.

For your first prompt, you should answer this question: Can rhetoric be useful and ethical, or is rhetoric at its most basic level an act of manipulation?

In your answer, reference a specific quote from a reading from week 1 or week 2, and provide an example of public rhetoric to demonstrate your point. Your example has to come from a public source – like a speech, commercial, or television show. It can’t be your own experience or a hypothetical example.

Requirements: 0.5 page

Introduction to Rhetorical Theory

The Maligned Art of Rhetoric

Rhetoric frequently gets a bad name as nothing more than empty speech or planned misdirection.  From confirmation hearings to popular culture, we often hear or see rhetoric being opposed to “facts”, “truth” or “action”. We are trained from a young age to distrust “rhetoric” as something that gets in the way of being able to come to a common solution. This is not a new issue. The conflict over the nature of rhetoric stretches all the way back to the ancient world, where the transition from orality to literacy and from autocracy to quasi-democracy in Ancient Greece saw a profound anxiety over the nature of language and the uses to which it could be put. In this class, we’ll cover a bit of that history to better understand how we have come to view rhetoric today, and to help inform our understanding of contemporary rhetorical theory. To do that, we go way, way back in time. Ancient Greece was by no means the first place to discuss rhetoric. We have evidence of rhetorical writings from Africa, China, and India in the ancient world. But here we will focus on Greek rhetoric as that is the foundation for a lot of what we will discuss later in the class. 

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Rhetoric, Theory, and You

Rhetorical Theory most often describes our ways of understanding practices of meaning-making and interpretation that rely on persuasion. As explained below, persuasion is traditionally associated with historical practices of speeches and speech-making. This is why Rhetorical Theory is often described as the “art of persuasion” or the “art of speechmaking,” although subsequent chapters will build on (and depart from) this foundation.

The two Greek words that combine to form rhetoric are techne, as art or skill, and rhetor, or speaker. The two terms are not explicitly linked in fifth-century Greek texts, and there is no explicit reference to the art of persuasion in the first recorded use of the word. The word rhetor was a legal term denoting a specific class of people: those who often put forward motions in courts of law and in the general assembly.

Perhaps the most widely circulated definition of rhetoric still circulating today is from Aristotle: “the faculty of observing the available means of persuasion, in any given situation.” That means that rhetoric isn’t just how we persuade. It’s also the ability to stand back from the scenes where persuasion happens to understand how and why it is happening. Another popular definition of rhetoric is “the capacity to affect and be affected.” This means that rhetoric becomes the art of movement, or how people use their bodies to create movements and change. Both definitions capture the perspective that we can take when we think rhetorically: one that seeks to understand the way that influence and power move and the role of communication in creating common knowledge.

What is rhetoric?

In this class, we will study rhetoric as not only discursive, which means a part of written or spoken language, but also as material, as physical objects and places communicate persuasively, and emotion acts on us in ways that are beyond the reasoned discussion envisioned by much rhetorical theory. In the following section, even though Dr. Palmer is discussing rhetoric as a practice of reading and writing, her insights are relevant to all of the rhetoric we will discuss this semester.

Rhetoric is the study of effective speaking and writing. And the art of persuasion. And many other things.

In its long and vigorous history rhetoric has enjoyed many definitions, accommodated differing purposes, and varied widely in what it included. And yet, for most of its history it has maintained its fundamental character as a discipline for training students 1) to perceive how language is at work orally and in writing, and 2) to become proficient in applying the resources of language in their own speaking and writing.

Discerning how language is working in others’ or one’s own writing and speaking, one must (artificially) divide form and content, what is being said and how this is said. Because rhetoric examines so attentively the how of language, the methods and means of communication, it has sometimes been discounted as something only concerned with style or appearances, and not with the quality or content of communication. For many (such as Plato) rhetoric deals with the superficial at best, the deceptive at worst (“mere rhetoric”), when one might better attend to matters of substance, truth, or reason as attempted in dialectic or philosophy or religion.

Rhetoric has sometimes lived down to its critics, but as set forth from antiquity, rhetoric was a comprehensive art just as much concerned with what one could say as how one might say it. Indeed, a basic premise for rhetoric is the indivisibility of means from meaning; how one says something conveys meaning as much as what one says. Rhetoric studies the effectiveness of language comprehensively, including its emotional impact, as much as its propositional content. To see how language and thought worked together, however, it has first been necessary to artificially divide content and form.

Content and Form

Rhetoric requires understanding a fundamental division between what is communicated through language and how this is communicated.

Aristotle phrased this as the difference between logos (the logical content of a speech) and lexis (the style and delivery of a speech). Roman authors such as Quintilian would make the same distinction by dividing consideration of things or substance, res, from consideration of verbal expression, verba.

In the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam reiterated this foundational dichotomy for rhetorical analysis by titling his most famous textbook “On the Abundance of Verbal Expression and Ideas” (De copia verborum ac rerum). This division has been one that has been codified within rhetorical pedagogy, reinforced, for example, by students being required in the Renaissance (according to Juan Luis Vives) to keep notebooks divided into form and content.

Within rhetorical pedagogy it was the practice of imitation that most required students to analyze form and content. They were asked to observe a model closely and then to copy the form but supply new content; or to copy the content but supply a new form. Such imitations occurred on every level of speech and language, and forced students to assess what exactly a given form did to bring about a given meaning or effect.

The divide between form and content is always an artificial and conditional one, since ultimately attempting to make this division reveals the fundamentally indivisible nature of verbal expression and ideas. For example, when students were asked to perform translations as rhetorical exercises, they analyzed their compositions in terms of approximations, since it is impossible to completely capture the meaning and effect of a thought expressed in any terms other than its original words.

This division is based on a view of language as something more than simply a mechanistic device for transcribing or delivering thought. With the sophists of ancient Greece rhetoricians have shared a profound respect for how language affects not just audiences, but thought processes.

One way to understand the overlapping nature of logos and lexis, res and verba, invention and style, is through the word “ornament.” To our modern sensibilities this suggests a superficial, inessential decoration–something that might be pleasing but which is not truly necessary. The etymology of this word is ornare, a Latin verb meaning “to equip.” The ornaments of war, for example, are weapons and soldiers. The ornaments of rhetoric are not extraneous; they are the equipment required to achieve the intended meaning or effect.

Thus, rhetoricians divided form and content not to place content above form, but to highlight the interdependence of language and meaning, argument and ornament, thought and its expression. It means that linguistic forms are not merely instrumental, but fundamental—not only to persuasion, but to thought itself.

This division is highly problematic, since thought and ideas (res) have been prioritized over language (verba) since at least the time of Plato in the west. Indeed, language is a fundamentally social and contingent creature, subject to change and development in ways that metaphysical absolutes are not. For rhetoricians to insist that words and their expression are on par with the ideals and ideas of abstract philosophy has put rhetoric at odds with religion, philosophy, and science at times.

Nevertheless, rhetoric requires attending to the contingencies and contexts of specific moments in time and the dynamics of human belief and interaction within those settings.

A final thought, courtesy of Dr. Hallsby

 At its most basic, we might think of rhetoric as “the art of speaking” or even “the art of speaking well,” which is part of the reason why public speaking classes are housed in Communication Studies departments. Before Communication Studies existed as an academic discipline, most of these departments were named “Speech Communication,” which reflects rhetoric’s traditional emphasis on the theory, criticism, and practice of speech-making. That’s still a central aspect of the theory that rhetoricians are interested in, although these theories have also grown broader in scope.

In this class, rhetoric, as we understand it today, is a collection of humanist, literary, and political theories that explain how speech motivates human action and imagines possible futures. As developed in this un-textbook, it is a theory of how speech, representation, and power are instruments rooted in understandings of persuasion and its audiences. Persuasion is key to rhetoric because it is both the thing that rhetoricians study and the thing that rhetorical scholarship seeks to generate: the imagining of a more just world.

Works Cited

1. Aristotle. Art of Rhetoric. Loeb Classical Library 193. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020

Adaptation of “” by Melanie Gagich licensed under .

Content adapted from “What is Rhetoric” in the  licensed 

Adapted from “Content and Form” in the  licensed 

Video ArgueLab. “What is Rhetoric?” YouTube, March 24, 2015, 

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