Rhetoric is the science of the audience. I mean, all conventional, disparaging notions aside, rhetoric is a science, and an art, it’s one of the arts of the logos. It is the art of persuasive speech, actually, it’s the art of persuasion, which is to say it’s the art of transforming audiences. You could care less what you think before, during, or after a speech as long as when you’re done they do what you want them to do, and the cheap practitioners of rhetoric on these shores, and in recent times have been the advertisers.
Eric McLuhan