From words to deeds. The written future of forensic oratory

Abstract

Greek and Roman rhetoric distinguished between the use of visual aids and the use of words in an imaginative and suggestive function, demonstrating the extent to which verbal communication can succeed in matching the persuasive power of images through evidentia. Nowadays, effective communication, even in the judicial sphere, requires a speaker able to imagine and an interlocutor willing to follow her. However, in our times a general lack of engagement with the science of rhetoric and the characteristics of the judicial system (at least the Italian one) and its protagonists do not allow for improvements of the oratorical performance, notwithstanding the guidance offered by rhetoric. In most civil and criminal proceedings, the abandonment of orality is expedient, with an increasing recourse to written oratory guided - through renewed training of all operators - by knowledge of classical rhetoric, adapted to the times, to the interlocutors, and to the—written—medium used.