xts "must be somehow shown to be foreign to the modern mind, even if their language appears to be intelligible" (Knoblauch and Brannon 79). The world view of ancients and moderns, Knoblauch and Brannon explain, is so different that ancient rhetoric, try as it might, cannot say anything useful to the modern rhetorician, still less to the student of writing.
In an attack on what they consider the programmatic "vebal decorum" on which Cicero and other classicists insisted for their rhetorical discourse, and to which subsequent teachers of rhetoric have adhered, Knoblauch and Brannon acknowledge that there is a certain "socializing responsibility of the writing teacher" to those who would seek to commnicate through writing. Knoblauch and Brannon continue,
But we suggest that, in each case, their exaggeration and
overemphasis have led to teaching practices which enforce
unproductive, even damaging, priorities. The relentless
concern for socialization, unbalanced by an equal concern
for nurturing individual creative ability, has caused a
stilted teaching emphasis on decorum, manifested in tedious,
uncompromising lectures on the modes and forms of discourse,
leading to sterile exercises in their applications which
resuilt in hackneyed, pointlessly conventionalized writing
To put it another way, grammar and punctuation are all too often considered stand ins for writing itself. The traditions of classical rhetoric, replete with lengthy explanations and definitions of terms, are the source of the problem. Classical rhetoric was born of a wholly different world view from that of the modern period, the efficacy of integrity or courage as timeless values to which Aristotle appeals notwithstanding. The classical perspective was limited in scope and must therefore be abandoned altogether in favor of a new rhetoric of process that is consistent with a world now ...