Rhetoric Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Rhetoric is the study and art of public speaking and communication. The Greeks developed the main techniques of rhetoric that would be used well into the twentieth-first century. Beginning with the Sophists, rhetoric emphasized the ability to persuade audiences and stressed the importance of style over substance. Rhetoric was initially one of the cornerstones of education, along with grammar and logic, and it was a critical component of political life. Rhetoricians such as the Roman politician Cicero built careers on their ability to sway the public through speech. The three main branches of classical rhetoric were: deliberative, designed to persuade or dissuade; judicial, meant to either indict or defend; and epideictic, which was ceremonial in nature and used to celebrate or denigrate.

Rhetoric fell out of favor as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, but was revived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rise of a new group of theorists to include scholars such as Kenneth Burke and the expansion of media, especially, initially radio and recorded sound, as a means to spread political ideas and persuade the public to support or oppose politicians, parties, or policies. In this period, the neo-Aristotelian critique of classical criticism emerged. This model was the first developed method to critique various forms of communication and had its roots in Aristotle’s teachings and emphasized an analysis of the communicator, not the actual communications. By the middle of the twentieth century, a new period of rhetoric had developed that expanded past the political arena to include art, literature, television, and a variety of other media. For instance, Burke discussed rhetoric as a form of communication that uses particular symbolic expressions to persuade a targeted audience, political or otherwise. Meanwhile, new stylistic elements related to more practical fields of inquiry such as economics and traditional scientific thought, became increasingly accepted, especially with the rise of the new media (such as television or digital exchanges) and information outlets, leading to greater influence on political decision-making models.

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