To teach students how to write in a contemporary style, a secondary-school English teacher must be able to describe adequately the kind of writing he expects. Since many modern writers frequently ignore the guidelines proffered in traditional writing handbooks, the "new rhetoric"--a descriptive approach to composition that substitutes…

This collection of essays on literary composition sets forth rhetorical principles formulated from a close inductive study of contemporary American prose. The first essay develops a system of analyzing sentences by structural levels and outlines a generative rhetoric for the sentence consisting of the processes of "addition,""direction of…