ABSTRACT
Expressivist rhetoric experienced its real flowering during the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s (Berlin 1987: 177-8). At the same time, expressivists were reacting against a perceived model of writing known as the current-traditional model. The traditional model of composition, as elaborated upon by C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon in Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing (1984), sees writing as a set of fundamental skills whose primary function is transposing what has already been thought into written communication. As such, language under the current-traditional model is nothing more than the clothing of thought, the means of making external what is internal, ignoring the critical role language plays in thinking as evidenced by the work of Lev Vygotsky (1962). Writing instruction is, thus, seen as the transmission of fixed knowledge-–rules of punctuation, modes of writing, the topoi of invention, etc.––to students who, it is supposed, are then able to apply these rules of writing to any situation or discourse with equal success. Finally, since the traditional model gives little attention to the writing process, the focus of instruction is on the finished product and its conformity to prescribed standards.
