Definition:
One of Aristotle's major branches of rhetoric: speech or writing that attempts to persuade an audience to take (or not take) some action. See also: What Are the Progymnasmata?
Etymology:
From the Latin, "balance"Examples and Observations:
- "And the last thing he said to me, 'Rock,' he said, 'sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.'"
(Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne in Knute Rockne: All-American, 1940) - "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
(President Ronald Reagan, Berlin, June 12, 1987) - "All deliberative discourses are concerned with what we should choose or what we should avoid. . . .
"Are there some common denominators among the appeals that we use when we are engaged in exhorting someone to do or not to do something, to accept or to reject a particular view of things? There are indeed. When we are trying to persuade people to do something, we try to show them that what we want them to do is either good or advantageous. All of our appeals in this kind of discourse can be reduced to these two heads: (1) the worthy (dignitas) or the good (bonum) and (2) the advantageous or expedient or useful (utilitas). . . .
"Whether we lean heaviest on the topic of the worthy or the topic of the advantageous will depend largely on two considerations: (1) the nature of our subject, (2) the nature of our audience. It should be obvious that some things are intrinsically more worthy than others."
(Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Oxford University Press, 1999)
Pronunciation: di-LIB-er-a-tiv
Also Known As: legislative, deliberative discourse
