The mystery of successful writing in terms of communicating the message, reflecting the writer’s individuality and creating the sound rhetorical basis is still undiscovered, though there is much spoken and researched about it. The three essays chosen for the present work, the ones of Elbow (1973), Freedman and Pringle (1980), and Britton (1972) explore the issues concerned with writing and language from different angles that are still interwoven in the complex linguistic context of communicating the meaning in a certain discourse. Their opinions coincide in many terms and reflect the present-day reality of writing, rhetoric and construction of meaning in language.
The essay of Freedman and Pringle (1980) mainly concerns the shift of the rhetoric paradigm in modern linguistics; the authors argue that the emphasis on invention has tremendously increased within the past century, that the audience, ethos and memory have acquired much more significance in the process of constructing rhetoric etc. More than that, they note the increasing attention not to the text only, but to the context in which it is constructed, with the proper regards to the demands of the audience and heavily relying on the individual peculiarities of the rhetor. One more innovation they speak about is that the invention as such, previously considered a gift for the chosen, is now taught to speakers and can be encouraged by heuristic strategies (Freedman & Pringle, 1980).
These ideas find a sound resonance in the work of Elbow (1973) describing the process of writing as not a structured and well thought-over process, but as a chaotic, improvisational act of creating something without realizing what it is until writing the final words. The unstructured approach proves to be a success for the writer and a fruitful piece of advice for those who have no abilities to write because of lack of creativity, i.e. invention (in the interpretation of Freedman and Pringle). Therefore, the ideas on the invention of evolution are supported by the practical findings of Elbow (1973).
As for the audience and context, individual peculiarities of the speaker reflected in rhetoric, one can refer to the work of Britton (1972) exploring the transactional, expressive and poetic types of written and oral language. The author speculates on the results of empirical research and analysis of young children’s and adolescents’ writings to explore what expressive components reveal their inner selves and the context in which they exist. He states that it is the human experience that plays a major role in the linguistic representation, and that the process of writing reflects the metabolic process of learning a language that exists beyond the measures of the learner, in the outside world. The role of experience and the reader giving the feedback to the learner is of utmost importance in the learning process, which proves the thesis about the audience and ethos significance in rhetoric (Freedman & Pringle, 1980).
The ideas voiced in the three essays are truly relevant to the contemporary stage of linguistic development. It is no longer possible to view speaking, writing and rhetoric as processes separated from the individual peculiarities and characteristics of the performers. The concept of discourse, which is the text welded in the surrounding reality, is firmly gaining significance in linguistic studies. Hence, the text alone does not represent any significance and does not provide material for analysis if it is not contextualized. The speaker (or writer), the conditions that made him or her perform the act of linguistic activity in that particular way shape the way of linguistic representation; the audience also plays a significant role in the choice of linguistic tools, as well as the very act of invention is not mystified but explored and trained on a regular, down-to-earth basis.
References
Britton, J.N. (1972). Writing to Learn and Learning to Write. In The Humanity of English. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Distinguished Lectures 1972.
Elbow, P. (1973). The Process of Writing – Growing. In Writing without Teachers (pp. 12-42). New York: Oxford University Press.
Freedman, A., & Pringle, I. (1980). Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition. University of Arkansas: L&S Books.