Okay, for real this time — what is rhetoric??

When you start learning about rhetoric, aka the study of persuasion, aka “a good man speaking well,” aka the study of writing effectively…well, you start to get really confused about what rhetoric actually is. Is it public speaking? Writing? In my education, I’ve seen the term used to describe all sorts of things, from the classic ethos-pathos-logos triangle to figures of speech to persuasive and propaganda techniques. Even after four years of secondary education, I probably couldn’t give you a straight definition of “rhetoric” without a LOT of context and clarifications.

So, here’s the context:

• The “rhetorical tradition,” or basically the study of the history of rhetoric, usually starts in Ancient Greece. Socrates, born in 469 B.C., was a philosopher who taught Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle, born around 384 B.C., took that education and formulated his own ideas and was hailed as the “father of modern rhetoric.” He ended up teaching Alexander the Great. For these people, rhetoric was about speaking, especially in public spaces, but it was also focused on the idea of dialectic, or the art of finding truth through logic and debate. The term “rhetoric” was actually first coined by Plato in his Gorgias, which was written after Socrates’ death.
• The emphasis on rhetoric being the art of speaking continued in Rome in the early A.C.s with Cicero (author of De Oratore, which literally means “on the orator”) and with Quintilian, who said that rhetoric is not habit or power of persuasion but the art of speaking well.
• Then, the invention of the printing press increases the popularity (and respect) for written rhetoric in the 15th century. The Renaissance also plays a part in this. “Memory” was previously an important canon of rhetoric thanks to Cicero, but now that people could write things down and print things, memorization wasn’t as crucial.
• The 17th-19th centuries begins the modern era, which brings about the Enlightenment and with it the elocution movement. People were learning to read aloud, thanks to the more widespread availability of texts. Speech was back!
• After the 19th century, the industrial revolution made printing even more cheap and accessible, further increasing literacy rates. Additionally, women were beginning to be allowed to go to school, but public speaking for them was frowned upon. Educators didn’t want to ask women to present speeches, but essays were just fine. This led to a shift in education away from oral persuasion and towards written persuasion.
• In the 20th century, with the rise of the middle class (which also led to an increase of focus on grammar, as the way people spoke was an indicator of class), there was an influx of students attending college. These students, however, couldn’t write that well, partially because of the new German model of higher education that allowed for class specialization (aka, everyone can study different things). In an attempt to remedy this, in 1914, Harvard introduced remedial writing classes taught by adjuct professors and other lower-level faculty (cough cough, women). But these professors weren’t trained in rhetoric or composition, and that stuff is hard to teach. So they taught what was easy: grammar. People learned how to write, sure, and follow random rules about writing and sentence structure, but it also led to a decrease in the study of rhetoric as an art.
• Also, because English departments had abandoned their public speaking and oration classes, other programs picked up the slack — namely, communication departments. All of a sudden, rhetoric started to mean different things depending on which discipline trained you. English scholars used rhetoric to study literature and write, and communication academics focused more on speaking. But the same concepts are taught more or less in both subjects, much to the chagrin of English-comm double majors such as myself.

Now you know! When people say “rhetoric,” they could be talking about a lot. And what we know and understand to be rhetoric continues to change every single day.

So how do I define rhetoric? I’m no expert, but I’m a fan of Quintilian’s definition, with some slight inclusive editing: a good person communicating well. Writing and speaking are so closely intertwined that I don’t see much value in trying to separate them very much; after all, most speeches start out as written notes and good writing often gets read aloud. I also believe that my definition emphasizes the moral and stylistic importance of rhetoric without focusing too heavily on silly grammar rules and being persuasive.

At the end of the day, we all have ideas in our head that need sharing and developing. Rhetoric, in one way or another, helps us do that.