Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students revives the classical strategies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians and adapts them to the needs of contemporary writers and speakers. It shows that rhetoric, as it was practiced and taught by the ancients, was an intrinsic part of daily life and of communal discourse about current events.

This is a fresh interpretation of the ancient canons of composing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. It gives special emphasis to classic strategies of invention, devoting separate chapters to stasis theory, common and special topics, formal topics, ethos, pathos, extrinsic proofs, and Aristotelian means of reasoning. The authors' engaging discussion and their many contemporary examples of ancient rhetorical principles present rhetoric as a set of flexible, situational practices. This practical history draws the most relevant and useful concepts from ancient rhetorics and discusses, updates, and offers them for use in the contemporary composition classroom.