Stephen Colbert’s 2010 Testimony

Complete 5 pages APA formatted article: Stephen Colbert’s 2010 Testimony. Rhetoric is contemporarily a formalized study and a civic practice. Westerners most commonly apply this practice in numerous situations, in their daily lives.

Aristotle defines it as a counterpart of both politics and logic. He also refers to it as the faculty of looking into the case at hand and finding available persuasions. Just as Aristotle’s appeals – ethos, pathos, and logos, rhetoric also provides heuristics available for conferring, discovering, and making arguments for given situations.

This practice aims at making speakers adept to engage an audience when delivering a speech, hence a potent tool in discourse (Richards 176). Classical Romans devised the first of the canons of designing rhetoric that moves the audience. These codes encompass aspects of innovation, arrangement, fashion, recollection, and delivery. Rhetoric is among the first of the three arts of communication of the earliest times.

This is alongside grammar and logic. In the ancient western civilizations, there was a dire need to educate speakers from the precise basic levels of education delivery in schools, to make them competent enough to move audiences and deliver plausible arguments. Westerners employ the use of rhetoric in courtrooms, public, political meetings,s, and other assemblies. Believers of rhetoric confer it to bring order or shape communities and considerably influence civic life.

Isocrates confers that rhetoric is an essential practice, not taught just to anyone. that can shape a man’s character and is a part of civic life. Aristotle further reinforces Isocrates’ ideas regarding rhetoric as a civic art that devises any means of persuasion, which various people could utilize in public places or settings in three diverse ways.

He gives an instance of an assembly personality deciding on future events, a member of the jury establishing past events, and orators who are able to persuade others with a command. He, therefore, divides the oratory practice into political inducement, forensic concerns, and ceremonial speechifying or mere flaunt. The nature of rhetoric, being a civic and public art, is, thus, capable of performing opinion-shaping (Aristotle et al. 15). Therefore, Plato considerably criticizes sophism’s use of rhetoric to falsely articulate ideas.