ABSTRACT
When composition studies were revolutionized under the banner of ‘Process’, everything that smacked of its contrary, the F-word ‘Form’ (as in ‘formalist’) became suspect. While indubitably valuable, the emphasis on process was accompanied by an excessive underating of formal motives. So terrible was the sterile traditional formalism that we rejected rather than transcending it. There is, however, (and was all along) an alternative, based in the New Rhetoric and an understanding of writing as social process, that can take us beyond the repressive false dichotomy between form and process. When Aristotle defined rhetoric as ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (1954:24), he was clearly thinking of explicit argumentation. But New Rhetoricians note how much verbal persuasion is implicit, structured into our words and ways with words. ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric centers in the speaker’s explicit designs with regard to the confronting of an audience,’ writes Kenneth Burke. ‘But there are also ways in which we spontaneously, intuitively, even unconsciously persuade ourselves’ (1966:301). The New Rhetoric sublates classical rhetoric largely by comprehending the manifold ways we human wordlings are shaped and moved by words. ‘The human animal, as we know it, emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment, (Burke 1966:53).1 Learning generic, socially preferred discourse structures is a crucial aspect of that entry into discourse community.
