26 Facts About Rhetoric

1.

Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.

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2.

Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos.

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3.

Rhetoric criticized the Sophists for using rhetoric as a means of deceit instead of discovering truth.

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4.

Rhetoric restricted rhetoric to the domain of the contingent or probable: those matters that admit multiple legitimate opinions or arguments.

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5.

Rhetoric was viewed as a civic art by several of the ancient philosophers.

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6.

Rhetoric further argues in his piece Against the Sophists that rhetoric, although it cannot be taught to just anyone, is capable of shaping the character of man.

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7.

Rhetoric writes, "I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character.

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8.

Garver writes, "Rhetoric articulates a civic art of rhetoric, combining the almost incompatible properties of techne and appropriateness to citizens.

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9.

Rhetoric is a public art capable of shaping opinion, some of the ancients including Plato found fault in it.

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10.

Rhetoric describes the proper training of the orator in his major text on rhetoric, De Oratore, modeled on Plato's dialogues.

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11.

Rhetoric began as a civic art in Ancient Greece where students were trained to develop tactics of oratorical persuasion, especially in legal disputes.

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12.

Rhetoric originated in a school of pre-Socratic philosophers known as the Sophists circa 600 BC.

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13.

Rhetoric was later taught in universities during the Middle Ages as one of the three original liberal arts or trivium.

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14.

Rhetoric has earned a more esteemed reputation as a field of study with the emergence of Communication Studies departments as well as Rhetoric and Composition programs within English departments in universities and in conjunction with the linguistic turn.

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15.

Rhetoric's is known for describing her process of invention in "The Exaltation of Inanna, " moving between first- and third-person address to relate her composing process in collaboration with the goddess Inanna, reflecting a mystical enthymeme in drawing upon a Cosmic audience.

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16.

Rhetoric thus evolved as an important art, one that provided the orator with the forms, means, and strategies for persuading an audience of the correctness of the orator's arguments.

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17.

Rhetoric suggested that while an art of virtue or excellence did exist, it was only one piece, and the least, in a process of self-improvement that relied much more heavily on native talent and desire, constant practice, and the imitation of good models.

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18.

Rhetoric's was the first permanent school in Athens and it is likely that Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum were founded in part as a response to Isocrates.

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19.

Rhetoric had a marked influence on Cicero and Quintilian, and through them, on the entire educational system of the west.

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20.

Rhetoric championed the learning of Greek, contributed to Roman ethics, linguistics, philosophy, and politics, and emphasized the importance of all forms of appeal (emotion, humor, stylistic range, irony and digression in addition to pure reasoning) in oratory.

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21.

Boethius, in his brief Overview of the Structure of Rhetoric, continues Aristotle's taxonomy by placing rhetoric in subordination to philosophical argument or dialectic.

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22.

Rhetoric's dissertation is still noteworthy for undertaking to study the history of the verbal arts together as the trivium, even though the developments that he surveys have been studied in greater detail since he undertook his study.

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23.

Rhetoric's teachings, seen as inimical to Catholicism, were short-lived in France but found a fertile ground in the Netherlands, Germany and England.

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24.

Rhetoric can be analyzed by a variety of methods and theories.

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25.

Rhetoric describes four of these as argument from analogy, argument from absurdity, thought experiments, and inference to the best explanation.

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26.

Rhetoric is practiced by social animals in a variety of ways.

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