What is Rhetoric - Essay Example

Through history, there have been many definitions of the term rhetoric, definitions that tend to clash or offer insights to the term. According to Reichelt (12), the most famous definition of rhetoric, put forward by Aristotle, states that rhetoric is, “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion”. The second definition of rhetoric given by Reichelt (13) is the one given by Plato; that Rhetoric is, “the art of winning the soul by discourse”.

However, Quintillian proposed another definition of rhetoric, in which he simply proposed that rhetoric refers to the art of speaking well. From an analysis of these three major definitions, I would say that rhetoric is a manner of speaking that helps a speaker convey a message effectively. Rhetoric is a tool that can be used to build or destroy lives, depending on the way the speaker chooses to use it. For example, a speaker can choose to use rhetoric as a weapon, which is still an application of a tool.