ABSTRACT
Planners, as I have heard them speak, tend to describe rhetoric as “mere words” that simply add gloss to the important stuff, to the objective methods that we use to discover the “facts.” On other occasions, they describe rhetoric with suspicion as the use of seductive language to manipulate others into embracing a speaker's preferred values, beliefs, and behaviors. We are not sure, in effect, whether rhetoric is trivial or insidious.
