This book is a unique, long-needed comprehensive study of whole-discourse form going beyond traditional prescriptions. Ancient and contemporary innovations are combined with a new theory and practical application. The author rescues the organization of persuasive/explanatory prose from long neglect and unimaginative traditional formulas. She demonstrates a new theory of form fluency in analyses of student texts and applies it in new 'form heuristics' that go beyond outlining. The main audience for this book will be professors and graduate students in the growing discipline of rhetoric/composition, or any teacher or writer interested in new ideas about organizing discourse.

Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

The mature writer is recognized ... by his ability to create a flow of sentences, a pattern of thought that is produced, one suspects, according to the principles of yet another kind of grammara grammar, let us say, of passages. Mina ShaughnessyRichard M. Coe has developed such a grammar, one which uses a simple graphic instrument to analyze the meaningful relationships between sentences in a passage and to clarify the function of structure in discourse. Working in the tradition of Christensen s generative rhetoric, Coe presents a two-dimensional graphic matrix that effectively analyzes the logical relations between statements by mapping coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate relationships.Coe demonstrates the power of his discourse matrix by applying it to a variety of significant problems, such as how to demonstrate discourse differences between cultures (especially between Chinese and English), how to explain precisely what is bad about the structure of passages that do not work, and how best to teach structure. This new view of the structure of passages helps to articulate crucial questions about the relations between form and function, language, thought and culture, cognitive and social processes.

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