| Rhetoric is “the faculty of discovering all the available
means of persuasion in any given situation” (Aristotle). |
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| Rhetoric is “the art of the discipline that deals
with the use of discourse, either spoken or written, to inform or persuade
or motivate an audience, whether that audience is made up of one person
or a group of persons” (Corbett). |
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| Rhetoric is “the function of adjusting ideas to people
and of people to ideas” (Bryant). |
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| Rhetoric is “the use of language as a symbolic means
of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Burke). |
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| “Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be
identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy
that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance,
the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the
recipient in decoding the message” (George Kennedy). |
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| “Rhetoric might be understood as the study and practice
of shaping content” (Covino and Jolliffe). |