The laws of rhetoric: the purpose and formulation principles

The article is devoted to defining criteria for distinguishing the laws of rhetoric from other postulates that correctly reflect the peculiarities of creating a rhetorical work, as well as analyzing the lists of rhetoric laws available in the literature and identifying their compliance with the status of “law”. The need for such a list is due to the requirement for the communicative competence in many professions, fixed in the Federal State Educational Standard in various positions. This presupposes the existence of concise and clearly formulated basic rhetorical procedures through which the specified competence can be successfully formed. The article presents an analysis of more than 40 scientific papers containing lists of the laws of rhetoric and explanations to them. Further, with the help of a systematic and comparative analysis, the proposed laws were selected, analyzed and evaluated for compliance with the requirements of the concept of “law”. The status of the law is given only to those formulations that meet the main key requirements, without which it is impossible to create a public speech. It is further argued that the laws of rhetoric should be discussed by experts in this field. The samples of the laws of rhetoric available in our scientific practice, proposed by experts from related disciplines (philosophy, psychology), do not correspond to the basic procedure for creating speech. The principles of other sciences can only be used at the meta-subject level and indicate the direction in which rhetoric should move. As a result of the application of the requirements listed by the author to the laws of rhetoric, a list of eight laws has been compiled, representing the sequence of actions that a speaker should perform in order to create an effective influencing speech. It includes both previously known laws and formulations proposed by the author.