Rhetoric is “the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.”Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric
I once attended a lecture by the legendary author Tom Wolfe who described the mandatory curriculum he took at St. Christopher’s school in Richmond, Virginia. His sophomore year included a yearlong course in “rhetoric.” The entirety of one semester was spent reconstructing, interpreting and rewriting a simple Latin phrase written 2,000 years prior. As Wolfe later explained in an interview with the National Association of Scholars, “we all had to take a course in formal rhetoric in our sophomore year. Not just simple figures of speech such as simile and metaphor and oxymoron but also the really beautiful stuff, such as metonymy, litotes, anaphora, periphrasis—Dickens loved that one—epanados, as in “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,” tropes, figurae dictionis, figurae sententiae……
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