Written by Charles Dyer
As I write this, I’m thinking about what type of writing this post amounts to. It appears to be exposition at its core. I’m here to explain something – in a mediocre way, to be sure – and to describe the way in which we teach and think about writing. That sounds expository to me.
I only do this because I have been reading about the “modes of discourse” for the past two hours. They have been laid out in various ways, tweaked here and there, but the bare bones of this line of thinking are that writing can be divided into four different types: narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative.
Here they are as simply put as I can manage:
- Narrative: tells a story, describing events and details
- Descriptive: is pretty self-explanatory, but is meant to describe something in order to create an image in the reader’s mind
- Expository: meant to explain something factually, to inform
- Argumentative: is also self-explanatory, but is meant to persuade or argue a point
This was how writing and rhetoric used to be taught. Up until the mid-1950’s, teaching the “Modes of Discourse” was the entire approach to rhetoric (Connors, 452). This begs the question, then: why am I having to read “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse” from Robert Connors’ book, College Composition and Communication to understand any of this?
Why do I have a degree in “English/Creative Writing” and not something like, English/Modes of Discourse? That may be the question of my life, but let’s keep going. Connors says that the pieces of discourse curriculum – narration, description, exposition, argumentation – started going their own ways as the century progressed (450).
Narration and description took the path of creative writing (there I am!). Argumentation quietly stepped out of writing classes and slipped into speech courses. Exposition, Connors said, “had become so popular that it was more widely taught than the ‘general’ modal freshman composition course” (450).
Exposition took off because our culture began the shift to media like THIS. This blog and its purpose of explaining something to you right now is what businesses, schools, governments, organizations, multi-billion dollar corporations, and the dollar store down the street are doing wherever they can. Admittedly, there is a little persuasion in there, but they are constantly explaining things to you.
All of this to say, the dusty modes of discourse still exist, just not in our classrooms. They’ve evolved and shape-shifted – they’re hiding in plain sight. Our understanding of writing and rhetoric is, put more simply, an understanding of the transformation of human communication. How we process the world affects how we teach our writers to describe it.
Rhetoric and writing is never dead or obsolete, it just adapts.
Cited
Connors, Robert J. “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, pp. 444–455. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/356607.
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