rhetoric is not dramatic, but logical. The order of the parts of a speech
is determined not by a plot, but by the needs of presentation to an
audience. For instance, a statement of the case is given first, and then
the proof is marshalled.

The objects of poetic imitation, Aristotle says, are character, emotion,
and deed, i.e., men in action,[19] inanimate nature and the life of dumb
animals being subordinate to these. The manner of imitating, if poetic,
Aristotle says is either narrative or dramatic. Under the narrative manner
he includes lyric, where the speaker expresses himself in the first
person, and epic, where the speaker tells his story in the third person.
In the dramatic manner he says that the characters are made to live and
move before us.[20]

Answering Plato's charge that poetic is not real, Aristotle erects the
distinction between the real and the actual, claiming a reality for poetic
which is not the actuality of science or of practical affairs. It is thus
that he distinguishes the poet from the historian: although the historian
also uses images, he is restricted to relating what has happened--that is,
to fact; while the poet relates what should happen--what is possible
according to the law of probability or necessity. Instead of rehearsing
facts, the dramatist or the epic poet creates truth. We expect him to be
"true to life," and that is what is implied in Aristotle's "imitation of
nature."[21] This truth to life controls, according to Aristotle, both
the characterization and the action. In the first place

Poetry tends to express the universal--how a person of a certain type
will on occasion speak or act according to the law of probability or
necessity.[22]