ABSTRACT
Technically speaking, rhetoric is the art of persuasion, though contemporary rhetoricians often use the term much more broadly. Aristotle defined the term rather narrowly in his book the Rhetoric. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Rhetoric, for Aristotle, is a metadiscipline, one that can be used to analyze how people persuade others regardless of subject matter or content. Rhetoricians also concern themselves nowadays with topics such as how written communication works, with the nature of narrativity in works of fiction and films and with stylistics in general. It also shows that rhetoricians have been the objects of people's attention, and in some cases ridicule, for more than 300 years. Since Aristotle wrote on rhetoric, we can see that this science has been with us for a great deal of time.
