Constructive Rhetoric Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART ONE KINDS OF COMPOSITION. 5. The Four Kinds of Composition. Rhetoricians generally note at least four Kinds of Composition: Narration, Description, Ex... more »position, and Argumentation. Disregarding exactness for the moment, we may say, in the way of rough definition, that Narration details a sequence of events, Description giyes the impression of some particular thing, Exposition explains a general idea, and Argumentation shows the truth of a proposition. These distinctions are founded upon the different kinds of subject that are likely to come to our attention; for this seems to be the most sensible basis to take while we are merely studying how to consider our subject, how to find out the best things to say of it, how to get the good out of it, and, in some degree, how to put in general order what material we can collect. We can always tell what kind of subject we are thinking about, and, if we can say " With such and such a subject proceed by Description," or whatever be the proper kind of composition, it will be a convenient way of beginning. The definitions given above include propositions, and terms both general and particular: whatever we are thinking of will come under one head or another. Terms, or names, are either particular or general according as they are the names for particular things or general ideas. Now if our subject be some particular thing which we view as a series of events, we call the mode of treatment Narration; if it be a particular thing which we are not so viewing, we treat itby Description. If we are considering and explaining a general idea, we call it Exposition; and if we are proving a proposition, we call it Argumentation. There are all kinds of Narration, of course—good, bad, and very bad; we call any sort of writing which considers a particu...« less