ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the essentials of rhetoric. Rhetoric has a combination of features not found in other creative arts like painting and music and poetry. Rhetoric's creations are practical ones and because they are the creations of real people living in the real world, rhetoric is a controversial thing to study. The chapter considers what various schools of criticism have to say about persuasion and then look at some of the fascinating things scholars have found about the many forms of rhetoric. It argues that Rhetoric is a special sort of human activity, it takes a special kind of practice to understand it, and by understanding it, one acquires a special perspective on the world itself. People make rhetoric because they must get something off their chests, because the cause they champion overwhelms their natural reticence. A major challenge for the rhetorical critic, then, is to study how namers name things and how audiences respond to the names they hear.
