Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges

Defining a rhetoric as a social invention arising out of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances, Berlin notes that “no rhetoric—not Plato’s or Aris­totle’s or Quintilian’s or Perelman’s—is permanent.” At any given time several rhetorics vie for supremacy, with each attracting adherents representing vari­ous views of reality expressed through a rhetoric. Traditionally rhetoric has been seen as based on four interacting elements: “re­ality, writer or speaker, audience, and language.” A