The last page said what this art is for. The application will make you do it. Open Ars Rhetorica at Act I, What Rhetoric Is, and complete its opening tutorial — the card titled The counterpart of dialectic. That deck is the definition, the three pisteis, and the three species, on real distinctions, not on invented classical-sounding prose. Then continue in the app’s own order: invention (logos, then ethos and pathos), arrangement, style, and whole cases built from actual speeches.
The app does not grade your compositions. It trains the eye: to name the species, the pistis, the office of the oration, the figure that is actually in the English, the missing premise of an enthymeme. Return to this course when you can say, in your own words, what still has to be done for these hearers after a sentence is well formed and an inference is valid. A good test is the green-cheese pair turned the other way: a speech may be congruous and true, and still fail, if it has not found the available means in this case.
Begin at Act I, What Rhetoric Is, and open the tutorial card The counterpart of dialectic (an orientation, not scored). Live address: rhetorica.studiuminstitute.org.
If you arrived from the voice path or from empty debate, do this work, then go back to grammar and logic so that you have something true to persuade toward. If you arrived in the default order, stay with the app through a first pass of the orientation and at least the invention studies before hunting figures. Figures without a case are ornaments. The cycle is the same: doctrine, then practice, then doctrine again with better questions.
When you come back
The same test, in the third art’s terms. Without opening anything, try to say:
- What is still to be done for these hearers after a sentence is well formed and an inference is valid.
- The three pisteis, and why ethos is in the speech rather than in the speaker’s reputation.
- The three species, named from the office of the hearer rather than from the subject.
- What makes a man a sophist — and why it is not his faculty.
The harder test is the one the app trains for: take a real speech you did not choose, and name the species, the pistis being used, and the missing premise of one enthymeme in it.
Welcome back
All three arts have now been begun. That is what this walk-through was for, and it is the point at which it stops being the thing you are doing and becomes something you consult.
Go on to The three arts together, which is written to be re-read. It holds the three questions side by side and a plain decision tree for telling which art your present trouble belongs to. From here on, that page is the way back in.
Then keep the cycle. An art returned to is not an art failed. When speech will not carry what you meant, the trouble is in one of three places, and you now know how to find out which.