📚 Rhetoric

The theory under the speaking: Aristotle’s canons, the figures, and the tradition that taught persuasion to argue back.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject rhetoric in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Συμπόσιον	Plato	1559	351
	The Elements of Style	William Strunk, Jr.	1920	288
	Φαῖδρος	Plato	1792	138
	On the sublime	Longinus	1612	113
	How to Speak and Write Correctly	Joseph Devlin	1910	68
	De oratore	Cicero	1755	58
	Simon & Schuster handbook for writers	Lynn Quitman Troyka	1987	36
	On Writing Well	William Knowlton Zinsser	1976	33
	Rhetoric	Aristotle	1515	29
	Elements of rhetoric	Richard Whately	1828	25
	The history and theory of rhetoric	James A. Herrick	1996	24
	Steps to writing well	Jean Wyrick	1979	23
	The aims of argument	Timothy W. Crusius	1994	22
	Writing with a purpose	James McNab McCrimmon	1950	21
	English Grammar and Composition	John E. Warriner	1963	19
	Writing Arguments	John D. Ramage	2000	19
	Elements of Argument	Annette T. Rottenberg	1985	18
	Writing arguments	John D. Ramage	1989	17
	The St. Martin's Guide to Writing	Rise B. Axelrod	1985	16
	Reading Like a Writer	Francine Prose	2006	16
	The Lively Art of Writing	Lucile Vaughan Payne	1965	14
	Technical writing	Sharon J. Gerson	1992	14
	Imaginative writing	Janet Burroway	2002	14
	The elements of rhetoric	James De Mille	1878	13
	Back to the Lake	Thomas Cooley	2015	13
	The Norton reader	Linda Peterson	2015	13
	The philosophy of rhetoric	I. A. Richards	1936	12
	A rhetoric of argument	Jeanne Fahnestock	1982	12
	Prentice-Hall grammar and composition	Gary Forlini	1983	12
	An introduction to rhetorical communication	James C. McCroskey	1968	11

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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