ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the art of public speaking as a rhetorical practice whose roots can be found in the classical tradition. Rhetorical public speaking uses persuasive techniques to transform a collection of individual hearers into a common and committed audience through the power of the spoken word. Part of this art requires mastery of the five canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. Also, learning rhetorical public speaking requires mastering the three aims of any speech, which is to move, to delight, and to teach, as well as the three forms of proof, which are ethos, pathos, and logos. Rhetoric must be understood as responding to a rhetorical situation, which involves confronting an exigence, adapting to constraints, and moving a target audience to accept some practical judgment. Any speech also conforms to the needs of a genre, specifically the three major speech genres of enrichment, advocacy, and commemoration. This chapter ends by outlining the steps to Monroe’s motivated sequence as a way of putting all the steps together.
