The term rhetoric is known to that discipline that studies and systematizes procedures and techniques for the use of language to achieve a persuasive or aesthetic purpose that is added to the communicative one. Rhetoric is considered a transversal discipline because it is used by a diversity of fields such as journalism, political science, advertising and literature.
The origins of rhetoric go back to Classical Greece where it became the technique par excellence when it came to the need to express oneself in an adequate and correct way to achieve persuasion in the recipient..
Verbal or written speech to effectively achieve the purposes of aesthetics and persuasion that we mentioned above will require the observation and presence of five elements that are interrelated. The inventio, dispositio and elocutio, which will make the linguistic structure that it must follow and the memory and actio, strictly necessary at the time of oral presentation before a large public.
The inventio supposes that the speaker finds in his mind and experience those best ideas, themes and proposals that are the most suitable for his presentation and that clearly interest the average of the public to whom his speech will be directed. Once the inventio is a fact, the device will come into play, which refers to nothing more and nothing less than the organization of all those ideas, themes, emerged in the inventio, in a carefully structured whole.
The discourse can consist of two parts or three parts, in the first case, the two parts maintain a reciprocal tension in the whole and in the second case, the most common, it will suppose a linear development with beginning, middle and end, being the exordium the initial part through which it will seek to capture the attention of the public, continuing the narratio by which the speaker will present his thesis and the matter that motivates the speech, then the argumentatio will present the arguments and finally the peroration that supposes a species of summary of everything said to which the opinion of the public will be added.
Meanwhile, the style of a speech, which of course will have a lot to do with its success, is necessary to what we call above as elocutio and finally the composition, it will be the element that will allow us to analyze the best way to structure phonics and syntactically a speech.
And as we also pointed out, the oral presentation of the speech will require an adequate management of two levels, memory, on the one hand, which is what will allow the memory of it through, for example, the use of mnemonic rules and on the other, the actio, which has to do with the gestures and the modulation of the voice that must be in line with the content of the speech. For example, if it is a topic that is related to a threat to the common good, then it will require gestures and an intonation from the speaker that denotes security, knowledge and ability to resolve the issue.
