abstract
In a body, words take on a whole different dimension from their disembodied existence on a page. Yet, somewhere along the line in the history of language in the West, practices of writing and practices of speaking got set on different, increasingly divergent paths. Though rhetoric has its roots in the art of oratory, students of rhetoric today are trained to write and to construct critical arguments, but they are rarely themselves trained in the delivery of the spoken word. Professional actor training programs, on the other hand, require little if any formal training in rhetorical analysis. Blind spots in both fields obscure the fact that neither is equipped to undertake complicated task of locating and understanding the dynamics of "voice" in text-based performance practices.
In this paper, I will use simple acting exercises and illustrations from observations of professional actors in rehearsal to demonstrate and hopefully start to bridge the gap between rhetoric as the study of written argument and rhetoric as the study of an embodied act of persuasion.