What is rhetoric? The art of persuasion, explained

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion: the study and practice of using language to move a particular audience to believe or do something. Aristotle, who wrote the most influential early book on it in the 4th century BC, defined it as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion". Those means are the speaker's character, the audience's feelings and the argument itself, and rhetoric is the skill of choosing among them for one audience at one moment.

In short

• Persuasion works through three appeals: ethos, the speaker's credibility; pathos, the audience's emotions; and logos, the reasoning.
• Classical teachers split the work of making a speech into five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery.
• Rhetoric isn't the same as lying or propaganda; what separates them is whether the audience can see and answer what is being done to it.

Where does rhetoric come from?

Rhetoric was born of democracy and the law courts. In 5th-century BC Athens, citizens spoke for themselves in the assembly and argued their own cases before juries of hundreds, so speaking well was a practical necessity, and paid teachers called Sophists taught it. Plato distrusted them: in his dialogue Gorgias, Socrates argues that rhetoric produces belief without knowledge, a knack for flattery rather than an art. Aristotle's Rhetoric answered that charge by treating persuasion as a subject to be studied, a power that, like strength, health or wealth, can do great good or great harm depending on who uses it.

The Romans made it the center of education. Cicero, the greatest orator of the Republic, insisted that a good speaker must also be a good and well-informed person, and Quintilian, a teacher of the 1st century AD, built his whole course around the old Roman ideal of the orator as "a good man skilled in speaking". From then until the 19th century, rhetoric was a core school subject in Europe, which is why so much later writing, from sermons to Shakespeare's speeches, is built on its patterns.

What are ethos, pathos and logos?

Aristotle said spoken persuasion comes in three kinds: the first "depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself", in W. Rhys Roberts's translation. They are known by the Greek words Aristotle used for them:

• Ethos, character: the audience believes you because you seem honest, competent and on their side. Aristotle added that it must be earned in the speech itself, not just brought in by reputation.
• Pathos, emotion: the audience is moved to feel something, pity, anger, pride or fear, that inclines it to judge one way.
• Logos, reasoning: the argument, from evidence and examples. Aristotle's main tool was the enthymeme, an argument that leaves a step for the audience to fill in from what it already believes.

The three work together. An argument that is sound but delivered by someone the audience distrusts fails; so does a moving speech with no reasons in it. Aristotle also said a speaker must match the occasion: a speech to decide future action, one to judge past acts in court, or a ceremonial speech of praise or blame.

How do the appeals work in a real speech?

The Gettysburg Address, given by Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of a military cemetery, is 271 words long and took under two minutes. The main speaker that day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. Here is how its key lines work, one at a time.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Eighty-seven years before 1863 is 1776, so Lincoln opens not with the battle but with the Declaration of Independence. That is ethos: he speaks as one heir among others of "our fathers", not as a commander. The old-fashioned "four score", which historians suggest echoes the King James Bible's "threescore years and ten", gives the moment weight. And "proposition" is logos in one word: the nation was founded on a claim that could be tested.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." The argument follows: the war is the test of that proposition, and not just for America, but for "any nation" founded the same way.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground." Here style does the work. Three phrases, each a stronger word for the same act, is a tricolon, and repeating "we can not" at the start of each is anaphora. The turn is surprising: the speaker at a dedication says he can't dedicate. It sets up the next line.

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." Pathos through humility. Setting "what we say" against "what they did" is antithesis, and it moves the audience's feeling from the speech to the dead. The prediction was wrong, which is part of the speech's fame.

"...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." A final tricolon gathers the argument into a promise. The listeners' grief becomes a duty, so the emotion, the reasoning and the speaker's modest standing all point at one conclusion: finish the war, so the proposition survives. Historians such as Garry Wills have noted how closely the speech follows the pattern of Pericles's funeral oration in ancient Athens, praise of the ancestors, then the dead, then a charge to the living.

What are the five canons of rhetoric?

Roman handbooks, such as Cicero's De Inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, divided the making of a speech into five tasks. They still work as a checklist for anyone writing to persuade:

1. Invention (inventio): find what can be said. What does this audience already believe, and what evidence and appeals will move it?
2. Arrangement (dispositio): put it in order. Classical speeches ran from introduction to statement of facts, proof, rebuttal and conclusion.
3. Style (elocutio): choose the words and figures, plain or grand, to fit the subject and the audience.
4. Memory (memoria): hold it in mind so it can be delivered naturally. For a writer, this is knowing the material well enough to explain it without notes.
5. Delivery (pronuntiatio): voice, pace and gesture, or for a written piece, layout and the look of the page.

How is rhetoric different from propaganda or manipulation?

The word "rhetoric" is often used to mean empty or deceptive talk, as in "mere rhetoric". The classical tradition meant something different, and three terms that are often blurred can be told apart by what they aim at and how open they are:

	Rhetoric	Propaganda	Manipulation
Aim	Win agreement on a question still open to debate	Spread one fixed message for a cause, often a state or party	Get someone to act without, or against, their own judgment
Openness	Speaker and purpose visible	Source often hidden, and rival views shut out	Methods concealed
Can the audience answer?	Yes, and a reply is expected	Rarely; it is one-way and repeated	Not without first seeing what is being done
Typical tools	Arguments, credible character, honest emotion	Slogans, repetition, simplified enemies	Lies, false urgency, exploiting biases

A practical test follows from the table: would the appeal still work if the audience knew exactly what the speaker was doing and why? Good rhetoric usually survives that; manipulation usually doesn't. The lines are not sharp, and the same figures of speech serve all three. George Orwell's warning that political language can be used to blur meaning and make the indefensible sound reasonable, which Nineteen Eighty-Four turns into Newspeak, is about rhetoric used to stop audiences answering.

That is also why rhetoric belongs with critical thinking. Knowing how the appeals work lets a listener ask the right questions: Is this speaker credible on this subject? Is this feeling fitting, or being stirred to cover a gap? Does the reasoning hold, or is it a logical fallacy? A democracy runs on persuasion, so the skill of judging it matters as much as the skill of using it.

Check yourself

• Without looking back, name the three appeals and give an example of each from the Gettysburg Address.
• What does the five-canon checklist ask a writer to do before choosing any words?
• How would you tell a piece of rhetoric from manipulation, using one question?

Sources

• Rhetoric, Book I, translated by W. Rhys Roberts — Aristotle, The Internet Classics Archive, MIT
• Aristotle's Rhetoric — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Gettysburg Address — Abraham Lincoln Online
• Gettysburg Address — Wikipedia
• Rhetoric — Wikipedia