Notes on A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition

Progressive Education and the aims of rhetoric and composition

Progressive education, in a school population with high immigrant diversity, stressed the communicative function of writing to unite diverse groups and integrate them into American society.
Example: a class writing project might collect data on a local social problem and produce a report to a public official.
Separation of composition and literature was rarely achieved in progressive practice; writing about literature could help students understand their own responses to text (Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 1938; early issues of College English, which the NCTE began publishing in 1939 [4]).
Progressive education’s social agenda in the 1930s–40s focused on life adjustment: helping adolescents through a difficult developmental period to emerge as productive citizens.
Innovative in social science use for English studies: interest in psychology and other social sciences as information for English; prior demotion of rhetoric in the late 19th century had reduced ties to the social sciences.
Aim: scientifically study students’ abilities, needs, and achievements and redesign curricula accordingly; however, these efforts had little effect on college writing instruction.
Freshman English: rarely devoted solely to writing; main goal was to introduce students to literary study and to edit literary essays toward long-established standards of grammatical, stylistic, and formal correctness.
When writing courses existed, syllabi often followed Bain’s modes of discourse and arguments similar to Blair’s good writer as virtuous person.
Major changes didn’t begin until after World War II.

Beginnings of Modern Composition Studies: New Criticism

In the 1930s, New Criticism supplanted biographical and philological criticism as the dominant mode of literary study.
New Criticism emphasized close analysis of texts and had little apparent common ground with conventional rhetoric or composition pedagogy.
By the 1940s, the division between literary study and the teaching of writing in English departments was so complete that literary specialists could ignore writing programs.
Nonetheless, New Criticism profoundly influenced writing instruction by treating literary texts as complex structures of meaning; even small textual changes (e.g., changing a word) could alter meaning.
This view helped scholars see thought-language relations as fundamental, not superficial; the freshman course based on the nineteenth-century “current-traditional” model treated thought-language relations too mechanically.
The NCTE mandated the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 1949; College Composition and Communication (CCC) appeared in 1950 [3].
In the 1950s, CCCC helped lay foundations for modern composition studies: improving conditions for graduate assistants who taught most college writing, sharing ideas among program administrators, and advocating for linguistics within English departments.
Post-Sputnik era in the early 1960s heightened concern to improve American education; sought to broaden the college writing course beyond socialization and linguistics to the full range of rhetorical concerns.
Wayne Booth and other critics began writing on rhetoric; in 1963, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer published a survey of research in composition; little valuable work was found, but the study encouraged higher standards for new research.
To give research outlets, NCTE began publishing Research in the Teaching of English in 1967.

The 1960s: Classical Rhetoric, Writing Processes, and Authentic Voice

With CCCC encouragement, composition specialists turned to classical texts and to later rhetoricians’ transformations of the classical heritage.
Collections of premodern rhetoric documents and discussions on the value of classical rhetoric for modern students were published.
Renewed attention to the classical five-stage model of writing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery. After Ramists excluded invention/arrangement and memory/delivery diminished to elocution, American writing courses focused mainly on style, losing sight of writing as a process.
Reclaiming invention and arrangement as preliminary stages of the writing process emphasized the whole process again (Gordon Rohman’s prewriting stages).
Style was recast as developing ideas by recasting sentences, not just using preset forms.
The writing process emphasis—self-expression and authentic voice—emerged from Dartmouth Conference on the teaching of English (1966 Dartmouth Conference) and related discussions.
The Dartmouth conference called for instruction that attends to students’ needs for self-expression rather than solely adjusting to social demands.
This era fostered a pedagogy encouraging personal writing styles that were honest and unconstrained by conventional rules; the concept of authentic voice became central (Ken Macrorie; Peter Elbow).
Elbow popularized free-writing; the Dartmouth model contrasted with Harvard-model courses that imposed standards on passive students.
The late 1960s–early 1970s saw teachers seeking critical responses to opaque, impersonal prose; authentic-voice pedagogy provided methods that became widely adopted.

The 1970s: Cognitive Processes, Basic Writing, and Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing-process interest led to inquiries into cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics; scholars began using the term composing rather than writing to emphasize cognitive processes in writing.
Early focus on invention and arrangement; development of structured invention techniques guiding students through an optimal composing process.
The particle-wave-field heuristic (Young, Becker, Pike) was one influential modern invention technique.
Prewar social-scientific calls by progressives for investigating students’ needs gained new traction: empirical studies of working writers by Sommers and Perl broadened understanding of composing as a recursive and hierarchical process (as described by Flower and Hayes).
Flower & Hayes model posited recursive, non-linear processes; the theory linked form of discourse to cognitive processes, suggesting discourse forms map onto cognitive processes and are accessible to all students regardless of background.
The rise of sociolinguistics: Labov and others highlighted dialect variation, challenging the view of cognitive deficiency in students from diverse language backgrounds.
1974 CCCC resolution: students have right to their own languages; it argued for allowing home languages in school assignments and called for teacher education to include dialectal variation.
Basic writing emerged as a focus, with Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations (1977) arguing for respect for students’ home languages while guiding them toward academic writing; many student errors are regular, rule-governed attempts at correctness.
The shift revealed that home languages and cultural backgrounds influence students’ schooling and writing development; socialization to school can be a barrier.
Cross-disciplinary writing programs (Writing Across the Curriculum, WAC) began to form to enlist professors across disciplines in teaching writing; Carleton College (1974) and Beaver College ( Elaine Maimon) were early centers [549, 550].
Toby Fulwiler stressed journal-keeping in disciplinary composing; WAC programs encouraged confident writing and collaboration in a literate scholarly community [543].
James L. Kinneavy suggested broader outcomes: wider participation in a literate community beyond the academy to engage public issues [547].

The 1980s: Social and Historical Approaches to Rhetoric

The 1980s saw a turn toward the social nature of writing while continuing cognitive investigations; writing processes were understood within social contexts.
Mike Rose argued that writer’s block can stem from poor instruction as much as cognitive difficulty.
Ethnographic studies (e.g., Shirley Brice Heath) studied writers across school levels and beyond, emphasizing social contexts.
James Kinneavy’s modes of discourse (expressive, persuasive, referential, aesthetic) were reinterpreted through Aristotle’s framework; this supported broader application in writing across the curriculum (WAC).
A broad interdisciplinary interest emerged: scholars in history, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech communication explored discourse as language use that constructs a community’s worldview and knowledge.
Theoretical perspectives drew on: Richard Rorty (against value-neutral language), Chaim Perelman (universal audience concept), Stanley Fish (interpretive communities).
Lunsford & Ede connected Aristotle’s theories to ethical, pathos, and logos appeals; emphasized that culture shapes persuasion more than a universal rationality.
S. Michael Halloran and James A. Berlin offered critiques of earlier rhetoric’s social scope; Berlin linked reduced rhetoric to stylistic prescriptions, while later work looked to Emersonian romanticism for a more social rhetoric.
The 1980s marked professional maturation: graduate degrees in composition and rhetoric expanded in English departments; CCCC produced bibliographies; the Center for the Study of Writing was funded; many presses published related scholarship.
A historical turn characterized composition as a serious academic field with long-term scholarly potential rather than a temporary fix for gaps in preparation.
Tensions between composition and literary studies persisted; debates about forming separate departments (composition and rhetoric) versus remaining within English departments; the Wyoming Resolution and policy efforts addressed inequities in the profession.
Feminist critique emerged as a cross-cutting force, highlighting gender, race, and class issues; feminist analyses of inequity in academia and teaching practices intensified.
By the late 1980s, race and social class were recognized as shaping basic writers’ experiences; scholars analyzed how to address barriers to literacy and successful academic writing; the politics of writing instruction gained prominence.
The era saw heightened attention to social justice, with Paulo Freire and other critical voices influencing liberatory pedagogy.
The 1980s laid groundwork for sociocultural approaches, including Flower’s sociocognitive theory, which treated writing as a socially embedded process.

The 1990s: Diversity, Postmodernism, and Cultural Studies

The 1990s extended the 1980s’ themes of social construction, politics, literacy, and gender into postmodern and cultural studies contexts.
Writing as social construction spread across technical/business communication, ESL, and writing centers; the field broadened beyond classrooms to include community contexts.
The collection Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age explored postmodern influences (Harkin & Schilb); Lester Faigley analyzed computers and postmodern consciousness.
James Berlin argued for reform of English studies using cultural studies; other scholars used such theories to complicate student subjectivity and advocate interdisciplinary research.
The field undertook extensive self-examination of its history and processes: Taking Stock (the 1990s), essays on invention, voice, writing centers, and writing across the curriculum; revisionist histories of writing and rhetoric by Connors, Miller, Varnum.
Women’s rhetorics: Cheryl Glenn documented women’s rhetorical contributions from antiquity through the Renaissance; Logan and Mattingly documented nineteenth-century women rhetors.
Influenced by feminist theory, these histories recovered voices previously neglected in rhetoric and highlighted archival research.
Longitudinal studies of college writers emerged (Sternglass; Spack) to address diversity and real-world writing development over time.
Delpit criticized process pedagogy for restricting minority students’ access to linguistic codes; Pratt’s contact zones and Anzaldúa’s borderlands provided spatial metaphors for diverse classrooms and encouraged students to blend genres and identities.
Literacy outside school gained attention (Moss; Street); scholars studied extracurricular literacy practices. Deborah Brandt and Anne Gere studied literacy practices beyond classrooms.
Service learning and civic engagement became components of composition pedagogy, encouraging writers to engage with communities and public discourse.
Writing in multicultural settings (Severino, Guerra, Butler) explored tensions without prescribing fixed solutions; focus remained on conflicts and negotiations faced by students and teachers in diverse classrooms.
Writing centers responded to diversity; DiPardo linked center clients’ difficulties to campus tensions; tutors could help navigate differences.
The 1990s also saw rising critical discourse on race in composition (Gilyard; Prendergast; Wallace & Bell); debates about racial representation and inclusion continued.
Categories of difference (race, class, gender) were complicated by overlapping identities (e.g., sexual orientation), leading to more nuanced analyses of student identities.
Electronic writing technologies became a major research area; scholars investigated rhetoric of online exchanges and critical perspectives on technology’s exclusions; Bolter argued electronic text changes writer-reader relationships and revives oral features.
By the end of the decade, the field was maturing: 50th anniversary of CCCC in 1999; publishing expanded across print and electronic venues; continued attention to equity for low-status instructors; debates over theory-practice relationships persisted.
Despite maturity, composition remained deeply committed to integrating theory and practice and to interdisciplinary collaboration across pedagogy, research, and theory.

Into the Twenty-First Century: Post-Process Perspectives and Concerns

Early 2000s responses to diversity broadened to disability studies, sexuality, and whiteness, challenging simple gender/race/class chronicling and emphasizing complex identities.
There is growing consensus that student identities must be understood alongside diverse histories, theories, and curricula; ongoing efforts to rewrite history and develop new theoretical perspectives and media/technologies.
Historical scholarship shifted away from demonizing nineteenth-century current-traditional rhetoric; scholars now reconstruct cultural issues and conditions that informed curricular histories and literacy conceptions.
Archival work has revealed underrecognized histories, such as the long-standing presence and success of African Americans in higher education and the influence of cultural imperatives on composition theory and practice (e.g., Paine; Royster & Williams).
Activist rhetorical education illustrated the shift toward language and ideology as central to pedagogy; balancing formal grammar with progressive goals persisted.
Women’s rhetorical education continued to be a focus; civic engagement and public rhetoric were emphasized.
Counter-histories highlighted recent decades (1980s) where vitalism and romanticism were reinterpreted; new epistemologies emphasized materiality and embodiment of writing.
Writing’s materiality and its social circulation were foregrounded by scholars like Trimbur and McComiskey (production, distribution, consumption).
Qualitative studies of everyday literacies (home, school, public) expanded; calls for materialist rhetorics for service learning grew.
The notion of literacy sponsors gained prominence, leading to broader sponsorships and partnerships beyond traditional classrooms.
Debates continued about how to accommodate vernacular literacies and the role of rhetorical dexterity in embracing diversity.
Self-reflection, grounded in qualitative research, influenced community service learning, civic engagement, and public writing—emphasizing community expertise, reciprocity, and sustainability.
The field broadened to multimodal composing and digital writing; scholars reexamined plagiarism in a digital age, visual literacies, and new media writing.
Writing programs increasingly focus on first-year writing and transfer challenges, acknowledging no universal academic discourse; attention to World Englishes and English-only policies increased.
A central challenge for program design is to imagine writing instruction from an internationalist perspective and to connect with business and technical communication as well as global contexts.
Writing programs increasingly look beyond the classroom toward community literacies and engagement, studying rhetoric, tools, technologies, genres, and infrastructure for civic participation.
The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing (seventh edition) exemplifies the field’s status in the twenty-first century and signals ongoing specialization and subfields.

Learning to write effectively in academic and professional contexts presents a series of challenges that can be understood through the lens of threshold concepts: ideas that, once grasped, fundamentally transform a learner’s perspective. For writing, these concepts are often troublesome to acquire, requiring a shift in thinking, but ultimately prove transformative, opening up new ways of understanding and engaging with textual practices.

One such transformative understanding is that writing is a knowledge-making activity. Student writers often initially view writing as merely transcribing existing thoughts or reporting facts. This can be troublesome when they realize that disciplinary experts actively construct and transmit knowledge through written language. The transformative moment occurs when students engage in research and inquiry-based writing, making and remaking knowledge from their own perspectives, and thereby recognizing writing as an expression and reflection of active learning and critical thinking. They move from passively reflecting information to actively shaping it.

Furthermore, writing is a social, rhetorical activity (a “conversation”). This concept can be troublesome as it demands negotiating complex factors such as diverse audiences, the influence of other texts, and disciplinary expectations, often across perceived language differences. It moves beyond a solitary act to one deeply embedded in discourse communities. The transformative realization comes when writers understand they are contributing to ongoing conversations, remixing and replying to others' ideas, and employing strategic rhetorical moves to engage multiple, complex, and diverse audiences. Linked closely to this is the understanding that writing addresses social situations through recognizable forms called genres. Initially, the vast array of genres, from lab reports to literacy narratives, and their specific conventions can be troublesome. However, recognizing these patterns of form, style, and subject and understanding that membership in a discourse community is tied to the ability to follow, or even subvert, these conventions, is truly transformative. Students learn discipline-specific genres not as rigid rules but as flexible tools for communication.

Another profound shift in understanding is that language and literacy cannot be separated from identity. For many, the idea that their personal language and literacy experiences shape their academic writing can be troublesome, especially when confronting dominant linguistic practices. The transformative power of this concept lies in empowering writers to explore ideas and present themselves authentically to the world, recognizing that their identities evolve as they become active agents within various socio-cultural, academic, and professional communities. By thoughtfully identifying, analyzing, and engaging with linguistic practices, students can even interrogate and challenge oppressive systems of power. This moves writing beyond a neutral medium to a powerful tool for self-definition and social critique.

Finally, the understanding that dynamic revision is central to developing writing is a key threshold concept. What is often troublesome for students is moving beyond superficial editing to embracing revision as a reflective and recursive process that involves rethinking and reshaping entire arguments, structures, and ideas. The transformative insight occurs when writers recognize revision not as a punitive correction but as a critical thinking strategy: brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, considering genre conventions, collaborating with others, and refining language for effective communication at multiple layers. Through this understanding, writers develop a profound rhetorical awareness, critically evaluating their choices and the impact they have on their intended audience. Embracing revision transforms writing from a one-time product into an ongoing, iterative process of refinement and discovery.

In conclusion, these concepts—writing as knowledge-making, a social and rhetorical conversation, genre-bound, intertwined with identity, and dynamically revised—collectively form a powerful framework for understanding the complexities of writing. While each presents its own troublesome encounters, overcoming these conceptual barriers leads to a deeply transformative experience, equipping students with the critical awareness and rhetorical dexterity necessary to navigate and contribute meaningfully to the diverse written landscapes they will encounter.

Learning to write effectively in academic and professional contexts presents a series of challenges that can be understood through the lens of threshold concepts: ideas that, once grasped, fundamentally transform a learner’s perspective. For writing, these concepts are often troublesome to acquire, requiring a shift in thinking, but ultimately prove transformative, opening up new ways of understanding and engaging with textual practices.

Troublesome Aspects of Writing

Writing as knowledge-making: Students initially view writing as merely transcribing existing thoughts or reporting facts, finding it troublesome to realize that disciplinary experts actively construct knowledge through written language.
Writing as a social, rhetorical activity: Negotiating complex factors like diverse audiences, the influence of other texts, individual identity, literacy experiences, and disciplinary expectations can be troublesome, especially across perceived language differences.
Writing and genres: The vast array of genres (e.g., lab reports, literacy narratives) and their specific conventions can be troublesome for student writers to grasp.
Language, literacy, and identity: The idea that personal language and literacy experiences shape academic writing can be troublesome, particularly when confronting dominant linguistic practices.
Dynamic revision: Moving beyond superficial editing to embracing revision as a reflective and recursive process that involves rethinking and reshaping entire arguments, structures, and ideas is often troublesome for students.

Transformative Aspects of Writing

Writing as knowledge-making: The transformative moment occurs when students engage in research and inquiry-based writing, actively making and remaking knowledge from their own perspectives, recognizing writing as an expression of active learning and critical thinking.
Writing as a social, rhetorical activity: The transformative realization comes when writers understand they are contributing to ongoing conversations, remixing and replying to others' ideas, and employing strategic rhetorical moves to engage multiple, complex, and diverse audiences.
Writing and genres: The transformative understanding is achieved when writers recognize patterns of form, style, and subject in genres and realize that membership in a discourse community is tied to the ability to follow, or even subvert, these conventions, learning to use discipline-specific genres as flexible communication tools.
Language, literacy, and identity: The transformative power lies in empowering writers to explore ideas and present themselves authentically, recognizing their identities evolve as they become active agents in various communities. By analyzing linguistic practices, students can interrogate dominant systems of power.
Dynamic revision: The transformative insight occurs when writers recognize revision not as a punitive correction but as a critical thinking strategy involving brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, considering genre conventions, collaborating, and refining language for effective communication (developing profound rhetorical awareness and transforming writing from a product to an ongoing process).