Aristotle divided rhetoric into three types:

- Forensic rhetoric, concerned with arguing whether or not wrongdoing has occurred, in the past.

- Deliberative rhetoric, concerned with arguing whether or not some course of action would bring about good ends, in the future.

- And epideictic rhetoric, concerned with ceremonial commemoration or declamation, praise or blame, in the present.

As should be clear from the definition of those categories, Aristotle thought of rhetoric as being entirely about political, moral, or otherwise normative argument: arguing that something is, was, or will be, in some way good or bad.

The Sophists, on the other hand, held that rhetoric could be used to persuade anyone on any topic, not merely normative persuasion in a political context; notably, they held that it could be used to convince people that something was or was not true.

Today, neo-Aristotelians continue to consider rhetoric to be something within the domain of politics, while neo-Sophists continue to consider it to be something that can be applied to any topic of discourse.

Though of course I disagree with the Sophists that rhetorical persuasion is all there is to truth, I agree in this matter that rhetoric is something that can be applied, for better or worse, to any topic of discourse.

But I still think that something much like Aristotle's tripartite division can be retained, reframed in a way accounting for that broader applicability of rhetoric, in terms of direction of fit :

- Descriptive rhetoric is concerned with conveying descriptive truth or reality, which is to say, opinions with a mind-to-world direction of fit. This concords roughly with Aristotle's forensic rhetoric concerning the past, because most of our concern about reality is usually with the past up to the present, the truth or reality of the future being highly uncertain. But we can and do nevertheless discuss predictions of the future, and this modified category of rhetoric I propose would concern the conveyance of them as well, merely in the capacity of describing the future, not prescribing it as Aristotle's deliberative rhetoric would do.

- Prescriptive rhetoric is concerned with conveying prescriptive good or morality, which is to say, opinions with a world-to-mind direction of fit. This concords roughly with Aristotle's deliberative rhetoric concerning the future, because most of our concern about morality is usually with the present on into the future, the goodness or morality of the unchangeable past being of less concern. But we can and do nevertheless pass moral judgements on things that have already happened, and this modified category of rhetoric I propose would concern the conveyance of them as well.

- Ceremonial rhetoric is concerned with the performance of ceremonial acts, like marriage and judicial sentencing, which have a dual direction of fit, the performance of the ceremonial speech-act changing social facts about the world by the very performance of the act itself. This concords roughly with Aristotle's epideictic rhetoric, inasmuch as both of them are concerned with ceremonial performances. But unlike that, this form of rhetoric concerns ceremonies with more than just commending and declaiming functions.