This is the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Rhetoric. Recently, I removed the word oral from that sentence. Another user (Tito4000) changed it back and requested that I raise the issue on the discussion page.

I have posted something to the discussion page (I haven't heard anything back yet). It will be interesting to see how this "discussion" shakes out. As I note in my comment on the discussion page, there is little doubt that Rhetoric has focused on spoken language at many times in history. However, when defining the "concept" of Rhetoric, it seems to me to be more useful to define rhetoric broadly. Then, we can move to a description of the different "rhetorics" that have popped up over the past couple of thousand years.

We'll see how this goes...