Summary of Rhetoric

Rhetoric is everywhere in our lives in language. “If language is in the air, rhetoric is the weather.” People have always been fighting and trying to get in out of the fights with persuasion. As we learned ethos is the attempt to establish a speaker’s authority with the audience, logos is the attempt to present a plausible argument in logical terms, and pathos is the attempt to move the audiences emotions. These three appeals are all important when making a speech and to fight for your argument. The three branches of Rhetoric are also important to persuade they are forensic (associated with the past), deliberative (associated with the future), and epideictic (associated with the present). It is important to establish the past, present, and future in your argument to persuade the audience of what has happened, what’s going on now, and what to expect in the future. The next part that is important is the five canons of rhetoric which are invention (discovery of proof), arrangement (shaping the argument), style (giving an argument a form in an argument), memory (absorbing the argument), and delivery (getting the argument across).

The most important parts to me in rhetoric is arrangement and delivery. Arrangement is important because every speech needs a beginning, middle, and end to make the speakers argument flow and not be confusing in the argument. Delivery is also important because it is where the speaker can make an impact on the audience. Also including the three appeals ethos, logos, and pathos is important to make the speech flow from beginning to end.