Moffett and rhetoric



less negatively, persuasion - “is the genesis of rhetoric” (ibid.). But as the argument progresses, it
becomes clear that rhetoric is seen as a verbal and non-verbal means of exchange and making things
happen in the world: “acting on others through words is merely one aspect of the larger rhetoric of
behaviour” (ibid.). What is contemporary about this conception of rhetoric is that it acknowledges
the multimodal. Speech and writing (the verbal modes) are seen as mixing with other behaviour or
modes, and only later are they separated out to be taught as individual and seemingly distinct arts.
So in drama, Moffett sees rhetoric in action: a rhetoric of persuasion. Such a conception of rhetoric
is Aristotelian (‘the art of persuasion’) which tends to put emphasis on the function of rhetoric
rather than on the forms. For me, persuasion is only one of the functions of rhetoric. If we adjust the
notion of persuasion to include a wider range of communicative functions (entertainment,
description, exchange etc), we could re-cast rhetoric as the ‘arts of discourse’ and thus marry
Moffett’s conception of the centrality of speech and drama more happily to his conception of
rhetoric...and indeed to the tenor of the book as a whole, with its emphasis on the ‘world of
discourse’. One of the great links that Moffett makes, however, is to suggest that the seemingly
distinct written forms in the English curriculum are all intimately related to the basic spoken and
dramatic forms and motivations. The following passage crystallises the argument:

Although we enter school already with a rhetoric, it is of course naɪve and drastically
inadequate to later communication needs. The function of the school is to extend the
rhetorical repertory and to bind messages so tightly to message senders that this relation
will not be lost in transferring it to the page. What is too obvious to notice in conversation
must be raised to a level of operational awareness that will permit this transfer. (p116)

Moffett also, by ‘binding messages to message senders’, re-emphasizes one of the main unspoken
themes of his book: that there needed to be a re-balancing of the productive arts (speaking, writing,
making) with the receptive ones (reading, listening). It is likely, in the literary-influenced English
curriculum of the first part of the 20th century, that the productions of school children might always
seem second best to those of published ‘writers’, and that the culture was one of deference rather
than of co-production. We still suffer such a deferential curriculum and set of practices now: reading
gets more research and policy attention than writing; English teachers are trained by their degrees
as advanced readers but not as advanced writers; and even in the age of Web 2.0, the authority of
the teacher is deemed greater than that of the learner. There is thus a politics of the English
curriculum and its relative balances that is implied by Moffett’s book, but not fully made explicit. The
nearest we come to it is in the wonderful paragraph at the end of the chapter on drama, in the
section titled ‘The Drama of the Classroom’, which focuses on pedagogy:

Instead of creating constant tension between the social motives of the student and his own
motive to teach the ‘subject’, the teacher would do better to acknowledge that his (sic) own
intellectual pursuits are framed by dramatic relations between him and the world, and to
recognize that this must be true for his students as well. Since discourse is ultimately social
in origin and function, it seems a shame to fight those forces that could be put to such
excellent use in teaching the subject. (p119)

For social and dramatic, we could use the term rhetorical, as long as we recognize that the rhetorical
is intimately tied up with power and thus, more broadly, the political. This “broader discursive
context” (p186), that Moffett argues is necessary to put the sentence in its place and for the



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