The evolution of invention in current‐traditional rhetoric: 1850–1970

Out of style: reanimating stylistic study in composition and rhetoric

“…Through the process of retrojection, therefore, the same opposition that developed between "product" and "process" and "current-traditional" and "new" rhetoric (see Phelps 1988;Crowley 1989) produced, as Elizabeth Rankin stated, "a similar implied opposition between invention and style" (Rankin 1985, 9). Maxine Hairston reinforced this dichotomy in her influential article, "The Winds of Change," where she wrote that "teachers who concentrate their efforts on teaching style, organization, and correctness are not likely to recognize that their students need work in invention" (Hairston 1990, 7).…”

“…However, it is clear that composition's consistent movement away from formal linguistics has been concurrent with the development of various language theories, such as literacy, social and public theories of writing, postmodernism and poststructural approaches to literature and composition, and new theories of rhetoric. At the same time, the discipline of linguistics itself changed during this time period, adopting a quantitative and formal focus that arguably put it outside the practical use of scholars in various areas of composition and English studies (see Crowley 1989). Additionally, as a field composition became disillusioned with the idea that language can explain meaning, and that idea led the field to seek other, largely social and rhetorical, approaches to writing.…”

“…While the association of style with words like "product," "traditional," "rules," and "correctness" (see Crowley 1989) leads to its close affiliation with "grammar" and renders it retrospectively counter to the aims of the process movement, what Phelps calls the generally more "progressive" aspects of writing have not escaped reductive views, either (Phelps 1999, 42). As a matter of fact, both ends of the dichotomy-process and product, invention and style-have been viewed unevenly by the field.…”

“…According to this largely untold story, style is not the product-based residue of current-traditional rhetoric that many say it is retrospectively (see Young 1978;Berlin 1987;Crowley 1989), but rather is a dynamic feature of the very process movement the field considers crucial to its disciplinary identity. Despite what has developed as our current conventional wisdom, then, I contend that the process period actually constituted a Golden Age of style studies, a time when style pedagogy was one of the innovations in the field, linked to those inventive features of composition that signaled advances in meaning, knowledge, and language.…”

“…Part of the division between style and invention, both during and after the process era, is a long-standing theoretical split between content (that which is invented) and form (style and arrangement) that raises broader issues about the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric (Crowley 1990) and thought and language (Vygotsky 1997). The debate centers on whether style can be separated from meaning, a question which, if answered affirmatively, echoes what Lev Vygotsky calls a "metaphysical disjunction and segregation" of thought and language (Vygotsky 1997, 2).…”