Over the course of its history (as a concept, art/practice, and field of study), rhetoric has been defined in a variety of ways. Classical definitions from Aristotle forward tended to define rhetoric as the art of persuasion and/or the speech you use to persuade. For a long stretch in the West, assessments of the practice and study of rhetoric grew more negative; many increasingly equated rhetoric with only one of its elements, style, and judged it to be shallow and empty, the use of language to cloud and fool people without attention to the hard, observable, scientific facts on which truth should be based. 

Even so, more recently, those who specialize in the study of rhetoric have revived an interest in rhetoric as far more than mere window dressing on truth, or even just “persuasion,” narrowly understood: rhetoric, say many contemporary theorists, has to do with how language shapes our thinking, our reality, our action, our attention, and our interactions with other people. Studying rhetoric means studying how we use language—and other forms of symbolic communication (visual, aural, spatial, gestural)—to do things in relation to others. 

Aristotle (4th c. BCE): “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic. It is the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion.” (qtd. in Booth 5)

Cicero (1st c. BCE): “Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio [invention or discovery], dispositio [arrangement], elocutio [style], memoria [memory], and pronunciatio [delivery]. It is speech designed to persuade.” (qtd. in Booth 5)

St. Augustine (early 5th c. CE): “Rhetoric is the art of expressing clearly, ornately (where necessary), persuasively, and fully the truths which thought has discovered acutely.” (qtd. in Booth 6)

I. A. Richards (1936): “Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.” (qtd. in Booth 7)

Kenneth Burke (1950): “Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” (qtd. in Booth 8; emphasis mine)

Lloyd Bitzer (1968): “Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.” (qtd. in Booth 8)

Victor Villanueva (1993): “Rhetoric is the conscious use of language. . . . Rhetoric becomes for me the complete study of language, the study of the ways in which peoples have accomplished all that has been accomplished beyond the instinctual” (76-77).

Andrea Lunsford (1995): “Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of [all] human communication.” (qtd. in Booth 8)

Wayne Booth (2004): Rhetoric is “the whole range of arts not only of persuasion but also of producing or reducing misunderstanding” (10). Subtypes: rhetrickery is “the whole range of shoddy, dishonest communicative arts producing misunderstanding – along with other harmful results. The arts of making the worse seem the better cause” (11); listening rhetoric (LR) is “the whole range of communicative arts for reducing misunderstanding by paying full attention to opposing views” (10).

Richard Lanham (2006): “For most of Western history, [rhetoric] has meant the body of doctrine that teaches people how to speak and write and, thus, act effectively in public life. Usually defined as ‘the art of persuasion,’ it might as well have been called ‘the economics of attention.’ It tells us how to allocate our central scarce resource, to invite people to attend to what we would like them to attend to. Rhetoric has been the central repository of wisdom on how we make sense of and use information since the Greeks first invented it sometime in the middle of the last millennium before Christ. This body of traditional wisdom does not tell us all we need to know about the economics of attention but it does at least provide a place to start” (xii-xiii).

William Keith & Christian Lundberg (2008): Rhetoric is “the study of producing discourses and interpreting how, when, and why discourses are persuasive. In other words, rhetoric is about how discourses get things done in our social world” (4).

Mark Garrett Longaker & Jeffrey Walker (2011): “Rhetoric is the study and practice of persuasion” (2). Moreover, thinking rhetorically (what Longaker and Walker call the “rhetorical perspective”) involves the development of three intellectual traits in particular: humility (believing cautiously), empathy (listening considerately), and intentionality (acting, speaking, or writing carefully and effectively (4-5).

References

Booth, W. (2004). The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Blackwell.

Keith, W., and C. Lundberg. (2008). The Essential Guide to Rhetoric. Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Lanham, R. (2006). The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. University of Chicago Press. 

Longaker, M.G., and J. Walker. (2011). Rhetorical Analysis: A Brief Guide for Writers. Longman. 

Villanueva, V. (1993). Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. NCTE.