Provided by Institute of Education EPrints
Moffett and rhetoric
Richard Andrews
Institute of Education, University of London
Starting points
Ostensibly Teaching the Universe of Discourse was written as a reaction to the ‘arhetorical’ practice,
as Moffett saw it at the time, of sentence combining and embedding. Although sentence combining
and embedding were themselves part of a 1960s reaction to the formal teaching of sentence
grammar (and have continued as practices up to the present - see Abrahamson 1977; Combs 1976,
1977; Lawlor 1980; Ney 1980; Stewart 1979 for research on the efficacy of sentence combining; plus
more recent systematic reviews by Andrews et al. (2004a and b)) Moffett bracketed them with de-
contextualised exercises that had little to do with composition for specific purposes. So the very
inception of Moffett’s project was, by definition, rhetorical. He wanted to situate English within the
tradition of the arts of discourse with their emphasis on function (why?), motivation (who?), the
audience (for whom?), the substance of the communication (what?) and the techniques available to
make that communication successful (how?).
The use of the term ‘discourse’ also made it clear that this book was more than a commentary or a
prospectus on English as a school subject. In fact, the acknowledgement comes early on in the book
that “some ultimate context or super-structure is exactly what English as a school subject has always
lacked” (p3). For ‘context or super-structure’ we could substitute the term ‘theory’. But Moffett,
with characteristic diffidence and modesty, holds back from calling his project a theory: “you are
advised not so much to believe these ideas as to utilize them” ( p v). However, the book could have
been subtitled ‘notes towards a theory of English’ because that is exactly the function it fulfils and
has fulfilled since its publication in 1968. Despite the fact that Moffett states that he wanted to
“recast into the psychological terms of human growth those familiar but opaque academic elements
such as rhetoric, logic, grammar and literary technique...” (p vii), the project as a whole seems
avowedly rhetorical in nature. ‘Discourse’ for Moffett means exchange, conversation, dialogue - in
print and action as well as in speech - and the ‘universe of discourse’ is the range of communication
in action in the real world as well as in the simulated (but also real-world) space of the English
classroom.
Another point of reference for the Moffett project is the relationship between teaching the universe
of discourse on the one hand, and literature teaching on the other. In the Foreword to the 1983 re-
issue of the book, Moffett defends his apparent exclusion of literature from the original 1968
conception. He declares: “I unwittingly threw off some readers who did not recognize just how much
in fact I was dealing with literature or how dear it was to me, so different did it appear to them in
the greatly expanded context of the total universe of discourse.perhaps I should have indulged
myself more.” (p vii). Again, what Moffett was reacting to in the 1960s was too close an association
of literature and rhetoric, characterized, for example, by Grierson’s (1945) Rhetoric and English
Composition which, although it drew the distinction between rhetoric and persuasion (thus
distinguishing itself from the Aristotelian position of rhetoric as the ‘art of persuasion’ and re-