broadening rhetoric to include informational, descriptive and creative writing and speech ) came
across as a mini-treatise and argument for literary stylistics. In Harold Rosen’s copy of Grierson, he
has annotated in pencil the point where Grierson recites the what, who, to whom, where, why and
how questions. Rosen seemingly distanced himself, as Moffett also seems to have done, from the
over-literary sensibility, associated with prestige and an elitist take on culture.
Finally, although rhetoric had been revived in the USA through the work of Burke (1950, 1966),
Booth (1961) and Corbett (1965), the audience for these works was largely in higher education. In
Burke’s case, the arguments were made for rhetoric as symbolic action; in Booth’s, for an
understanding of narrative as rhetoric in literary studies; and in Corbett’s, as a primer in classical
rhetoric for undergraduate students’ composition.
In summary, then, as a starting position for what Moffett was trying to do in 1968, we can say that
he was running against currents of the time that were emphasizing either literary or technical
approaches to English teaching; and that his effort was to find new ground for the construction of
the beginnings of a theory of school English, based on human intellectual, cognitive, emotional
growth and on a broader, more contemporary, more generous sense of rhetoric than had been
current.
To what degree is this a rhetorical model?
It should be clear from the opening of this chapter that by ‘rhetorical’ I mean ‘pertaining to rhetoric’
in the positive sense, rather than suggesting that Moffett’s position is the result of posturing, or that
the ‘model’ is itself mere gestural politics within the English field. The source of Moffett’s reflections
on language development is deeply rhetorical in that it establishes “the ultimate context of
somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” (p5) as a level at which it is necessary to
make sense of discourses within the English classroom. While it may not have been until 1971 and
Kinneavy’s attempt, in A Theory of Discourse, to establish the approach as theoretical, it is Moffett’s
achievement to have provided the basis for such a theory.
If “somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” is the sine qua non of discourse, its
definition is “any piece of verbalisation complete for its original purpose” (pp 10-11). The nub of
Moffett’s model then follows: “What creates different kinds of discourse are shifts in the relations
among persons - increasing rhetorical distance between speaker and listener, and increasing
abstractive altitude between the raw matter of some subject and the speaker’s symbolization of it”
(p 11). At the heart of the rhetorical model, then, is dialogue ( the word derives from the Greek
meaning through the spoken word, rather than two people speaking). In most cases, the dialogue
does involve two or more people and this is the way Moffett interprets it. In fact, for Moffett, the
existence of two or more people in dialogue is the starting point for discourse: the formulaic version
is more accurately “somebody-talking-with-somebody-else-about-something”. It is this move to the
dialogic (in the contemporary sense of that term) that is at the core of Moffett’s conception and use
of rhetoric. This is not the rhetoric of a single orator expounding to a passive audience; it is the
rhetoric of exchange.