The key distinction lies between reporting facts and telling an engaging story, or between instructing and persuading, or between delivering a finished strategy to be implemented mechanically versus harnessing others to fill the strategy’s gaps to the point of commitment and action. Thus many authors recite rhetoric’s canons or list of to-dos without revealing them as part of a fully articulated communicative tradition. Others flip back to Aristotle’s triad of logos, ethos, and pathos without addressing “Why three?” or “Why do we need rhetoric?” or “So what?”
