The whole art of spoken discourse, especially persuasive discourse. This definition is implicit in Aristotle's, who identifies rhetoric with persuasion but includes a miscellaneous category for ceremonial or epideictic speech, which includes exposition. Rhetoric is limited here to discourse, and excludes such motivators as gold, guns, and non-discursive symbols. Rhetoric is thus closely involved with logical and psychological studies, employs imagination and emotion not to supplant but to support reason.
Rhetoric aims at what is worth doing, what is worth trying.
This, like other functions of a complete rhetoric, has been taken over by the disciplines which rhetoric serves. Such close alliance of rhetoric and education was present in the Renaissance, and however sterile and mechanical rhetorical method may at times have become, at least they had a method for constructing and analyzing discourse. There has recently been much excellent scholarship in rhetoric, but much more needs to be done. The relations of rhetoric and poetic are being studied now as a result of renaissance scholarship, of interest in satire, of the work of Kenneth Burke. But the purely poetic seeks an imaginative experience, perhaps for emotional therapy, while rhetoric seeks a predetermined channeling of understanding or attitude.