Module 5: Rhetoric - From classical to contemporary rhetoric

The ancient Greeks thought of rhetoric as set of skills or techniques. If you learned them well, you'd be a better speaker, and you'd enhance your capacity to be persuasive, whatever case you were trying to make to whatever audience you were speaking to. Rhetoric was very much a practical art. During the Roman era of rhetoric, on through the Medieval and Renaissance periods and into the Modern age, this perspective did not change. True, different emphases and different tools emerged or declined, but at the end of the day, rhetoric was about, as the Roman rhetoric Quintilian put it, "the good man speaking well."

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• Keane Moraes