Rhetorica:
Style
Over
Substance

There are multiple kinds of structure, depending on what you are writing: A history need not be structured the same way as a meditation, and neither will be built quite the same way as a political treatise, which will be differently written from a drama, etc. Rhetoric in the sense we are concerned with, which leans practical rather than artistic, tends to center either on persuasive speeches (especially in older literature) or on argumentative essays;⁴ both of these share essentially the same underlying form, discussed below.

The Teeth of Argument

Following Cicero and Quintilian (a Roman orator and grammarian born about seventy or eighty years after Cicero’s death), we can establish the following as structural elements necessary to argument. They are given with their traditional titles in Latin, since modern scholars of rhetoric often still use these titles to distinguish their topic from other uses of the English terms.

I. Opening/Exōrdium
II. Positive Arguments/Cōnfirmātiō
III. Rebuttals of Opposition/Cōnfūtātiō
IV. Closing/Perōrātiō

This fourfold structure is slightly simplified from the actual sequence the Roman orators recommended. However, this will suffice for our purposes.

I. Opening

This is necessary to put one’s audience in the right frame of mind, so to speak. The rhetor should articulate what the topic at stake is, what the contention is about, the view they propose to defend, and a sketch of their reasons for doing so. This is also the point at which the rhetor should establish their tone (which chiefly means the level of formality at which they will be speaking).

II. Arguments

Here, the rhetor provides positive arguments for adopting their favored position. A minimum of two positive arguments is ideal, while more than five is rarely worth the bother; it is also most effective to place the second-strongest argument first and the very strongest argument last, since the beginning and ending tend to be the parts of a discourse we recall the best.

III. Rebuttals

Here, the rhetor counteracts actual or foreseen arguments made by supporters of one or more contrary positions on the subject. This is also the appropriate place for the rhetor to answer actual or foreseen rebuttals of their own positive arguments and rebuttals.

IV. Closing

Finally, the rhetor wraps everything up with a brief restatement of the position they have taken and the basic thrust of the arguments and rebuttals supporting it.

I and IV are primarily aids to the audience’s memory, though they also serve as opportunities to exhibit an intelligently professional ēthos; the meat of argument naturally falls into II and III. Moving elements of this structure around is perfectly fine, and in fact may be recommended, depending on circumstance; for instance, an already-unpopular view might call for the rebuttals to be expounded first, in order to gain a real hearing for the cōnfirmātiō. Or, when speaking to an audience apt to be impressed by confidence, a rhetor might, as a vaunt, give a convincing case for the opposite idea, and then dismantle that and present his case for his own, highlighting how it avoids the pitfalls into which the opposite idea actually does fall.

What of the other structures?—the form of a play, a history, a collection of riddles concocted to guide their solver to the location of King Solomon’s mines? Those lie beyond the scope of this piece; ordinarily, they are related by teachers of literature and history (or failing that, picked up by students of those disciplines in the course of reading plays, histories, and riddles). We have now only one final layer to clothe rhetoric in before it is full-grown.

¹If your reaction to this is “What do you mean ‘when the goal is to persuade’? That is rhetoric’s goal!”, the author courteously urges you to read the introduction to this series; however, if you haven’t time to do that, his summary of its point is that rhetoric can be used to persuade, but is in substance the art of communication—a tool for listening and reading just as much as for speaking and writing.
²I.e., The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. First composed by Strunk alone (then a Professor of English at Cornell) and published independently in 1919, it has since been through at least nine editions, and become perhaps the foremost authority in North America on English stylistics. Celebrated twentieth-century author and critic Dorothy Parker once said of the book, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
³The circumflex (^) is occasionally used in place of the macron (¯) to mark long vowels in Latin (here, it has been selected due to formatting constraints in this portion of the post); the difference is not significant. A little unusually, the Latin here employs the ablative phrase patientiā nostrā as, effectively, the direct object of the verb abūtere—which, take note, is not an infinitive: It is a slight mutation of the 2nd-person sg. future active indicative of the deponent verb abūtī, meaning “to misuse, consume, squander.” The un-mutated form would be abūteris; the change from -ris to -re was commonplace in contemporary Latin, and a similar change was often made to the third-person plural perfect active ending, -ērunt to -ēre. These were not unlike contractions in English (save that Latin did not stigmatize this usage).
⁴Argumentative essays are contrasted with, e.g., meditative essays, which explore a topic without necessarily taking one “side” against another, and indeed without necessarily reaching a definite conclusion; the essays of Michel de Montaigne are a useful example.

Gabriel Blanchard is a freelance writer contributing to the CLT Journal. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

If you’re looking for more to read this summer, take a glance at the suggestions offered here by Miss Faith Walessa—fiction and nonfiction alike. Thank you for reading the Journal.

Published on 24th July, 2025. Page image of Finis Gloriæ Mundi (1672), “The End of Worldly Glory,” one of a pair of memento mori paintings by Juan de Valdés Leal, an artist of the Spanish Baroque. Here (though some parts of the following description lie outside our selection from the painting), a stigmatic hand holds a set of scales which bear the Spanish phrase ni más ni menos (“no more no less”) on the pans, over the corpses of a bishop and a knight. The bishop’s corpse—which seems the more decayed of the two; insects crawl on its vestments—lies beneath the pan that says ni más, containing a snarling dog, a dully-colored heart, and a mass of peacock feathers; a ram’s skull (a long-standing emblem of the devil) is mounted on a pillar behind it. The knight’s corpse lies under the pan saying ni menos, which holds a richly decorated book (probably a Bible or missal), a crucifix, a rosary, and a more brightly painted heart surmounted by the monogram IHS (a traditional abbreviation-alteration of the Greek ΙΗΣΟΥΣ [Iēsous], “Jesus”). The apparent message is that the bishop, despite his office of service to the Church, was at bottom only interested in earthly gain, and that the knight, although his formal affairs were secular, was inwardly devout—and that the character of both men has always been visible to Christ as Judge.