What is rhetoric?

I have no idea what rhetoric is... well, that's not true. Part of the challenge is that rhetoric is a lot of things. Beyond being "the art of persuasion," rhetoric is the ways that the world falls into meaningful chunks around us, and the way that we extract meaning and try to give it to others. I realize,quite often, that I tend to use rhetoric with my students as a short cut for very complicated actions that I know about, but they might not. For example, I use "reading the rhetorical situation" and then I pull up short: I don't think that I have told them that reading the rhetorical situation entails defining the situation, naming actors, describing them, understanding the social conventions and structures that the whole game is happening in, discovering the goals of the writing that you have, looking for conflict, looking for openings, deciding on ethos and your ethical responsibilities...
EEEEP!
So when I am thinking about how to talk about rhetoric in a business setting, I am thinking about how to take a very complicated action and, if not make it simple for my students, making the complications clear. Luckily, in business writing, I think this becomes clear for the students. There are stakes when you make a wrong move in the business world, and being able to understand that you are in a maze of choices can at least help you recognize how to avoid the bad consequences. While, as a rhetorician, everything for me is rhetorical, I think that every document in business writing carries a weight on it. I might fire an email off to Dave and think about it, but not too hard... but if I was always looking over my shoulder wondering when and if Dave was going to "downsize" me... I would read that email a few more times. Maybe it is that we in the academy get our ethos differently then those in the business world. We write and talk and teach. They are suits and documents, and so when those business document go they become locations of identity
Sounds like a pretty rough rhetorical world