The paper proposes the employment of exemplary rhetorical tropes and figures present in literary works for further development of presentation skills in tertiary education students through strengthening their communicative competence. It reflects on rhetorical devices (both semantic and syntactic) and figurative language based on Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers to be later-on used in a contemporary business context to a make any public presentation less of a bore. It strongly promotes and hopefully envisions the great comeback of long-forgotten rhetorical studies that should be reintroduced in HEI agendas in the form of Interpersonal Communication and Public Presentation courses.

The article is a pragmalinguistic analysis of the inaugural addresses delivered by U.S. presidents from 1981 to 2021. The study was conducted using Voyant Tools, a computer software used in corpus linguistics. Four aspects/parameters of the text that affect its level of complexity and thus the level of assimilation of the message (reading ease) were examined. The analysis included (1) lexical density; (2) average sentence length; (3) readability indices including: Gunning Fog, Flesch-Kincaid and SMOG Index; and (4) a tag cloud (cirrus). The point of reference is the classical Ciceronian concept of the Ideal Speaker, which assumes that the political communicator is both erudite, and linguistically competent, encompassing Latin terms sapientia (the personification of widsdom) and eloquentia (the art of oratory). It boils down to an assumption that a fully competent political actor knows the rules of making speeches so as to reach both elites (Latin: optimates) and ordinary citizens (Latin populares). Using a pragmalinguistic approach, it was questioned whether the presidential addresses analyzed provide evidence that the communicators delivering them meet the criteria, fitting into the role of the ideal orator.

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Larva, pupa, imago: próba redefinicji pojęcia wizerunku politycznego w ujęciu komunikologicznym

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