The Figures of Speech,Ethos,and Aristotle: Notes Toward a Rhetoric of Business Communication

Abstract

After observing that business writers rely far more heavily than expected on the classical figures of speech, the authors turn to Aristotle's Rhetoric to show that the figures offer a powerful tool for the persuasive function of modern business communication. In this way business communication takes its rightful place beside judicial, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric, leading the authors to sketch an outline of this fourth, modern kind of rhetoric from an Aristotelian perspective.