  By highlighting and refining techniques for successful speech, the Rhetoric is plainly prescriptive—but only relative to the goal of persuasion.   It does not, however, select its own goal or in any way dictate the end of persuasive speech: rather, the end of rhetoric is given by the nature of the craft itself.  In this sense, the Rhetoric is like both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics in bearing the stamp of Aristotle’s broad and encompassing teleology. 