Moffett 31: "Rhetoric, or the art of acting on someone through words, is an abstractive act. That is, one performs the same activities in pitching a subject to an audience as one does in extracting that subject from raw phenomena: one selects and reorganizes traits of things, digests, codes preferentially. A course in rhetoric teaches how to present material successfully, how to find subjects; how to choose words and sentence structures, how to enchain items in sequence and patterns."
Moffett 32: "It is not always possible, in looking at a composition, to tell which choices of words and organization stemmed from selective summary of the subject and which from an effort at getting certain effects on an audience. When we think it is the latter we call the choice 'rhetorical.'"