Rhetoric
The art of effective speaking and writing, and the study of how language persuades. In everyday use, often a dismissal: "mere rhetoric" means words in place of substance. The techniques on this site are rhetoric turned to a purpose the audience is not meant to notice.
Rhetoric was the central subject of ancient education, taught as a craft with named parts: finding the arguments, arranging them, choosing the words, remembering the speech, delivering it. Aristotle's treatise and the Roman handbooks of Cicero and Quintilian cataloged hundreds of figures, from the rhetorical question to the deliberate understatement, and most of the Language family on this site would have been recognizable to a student in Athens.
The word turned pejorative as the craft became suspect. By the twentieth century "rhetoric" in ordinary speech meant ornament without content, and "empty rhetoric" became a cliché. The academic sense survived in departments of rhetoric and composition, where the term still means the study of how texts persuade, without judgment on whether they should.
For a reader of this site, the useful sense is the neutral one. A Rhetorical Question, a Repetition, a Hyperbole are rhetorical figures; they become propaganda techniques when they are used to carry a conclusion past the audience's judgment rather than to make an argument memorable. The figure is the same in both cases. The purpose is not.
Compare persuasion.
Sources
- Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Quintilian. The Orator's Education. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. 5 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
- Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0520273689