ABSTRACT
Rhetoric is a term that people use all the time, but not everyone knows what it means, in part because rhetoric has several different meanings. One sense of the word is speech that doesn’t convey anything of substance. Politicians who make appealing, but ultimately false, promises to voters in campaign speeches, for example, are said to use “empty rhetoric.” Then there are those books that purport to teach people how to write. Called “rhetorics,” they represent another meaning of the term.
