Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 027
Make the argument survive the presentation
Persuasion integrates enacted character, proportionate emotion, and defensible argument within a specific decision situation
Premise
Executive presentations often reduce ethos, pathos, and logos to a checklist: add credentials, a story, and data. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is more demanding. Rhetoric is the capacity to discern the available means of persuasion in a given case—an analytical art shaped by this audience, issue, decision, and institutional setting.
The framework changes preparation from content assembly to judgment design. The speaker’s enacted character, the audience’s emotional orientation, and the argument’s accepted premises jointly shape persuasion. Effective rhetoric remains uncertain, and persuasive force does not certify truth or ethical legitimacy.
What the model is: Aristotle’s Rhetoric — Three Artistic Proofs in Knowledge →
Continue in the series
- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainPersuasion & Argument
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.