Alexander Bain’s excerpt from “English Composition and Rhetoric” fascinated me as I saw in it the roots of contemporary composition and grammar that was taught to me in grade school.  In this excerpt, Bain breaks out principles and rules of composition into two parts. Part one he says “pertains to composition in general” (874).  The second part “comprises what is special to the five leading kinds of composition, namely, description, narration, exposition, oratory, and poetry” (874).  His explanation of composition in general is what truly caught my eye, because in this segment he discusses figures of speech and the importance of sentence and paragraph structure.  In particular he emphasizes the necessity of the formulation of the paragraph stating that the paragraph must have cohesion of topic or unity of purpose, each sentence must follow logically from the next, and the writer must employ the use of a topic sentence.  He maintains that if the writer diligently holds to these fundamentals and concerns himself with the structure of the paragraph then the work as a whole will be coherent and well written. 

I know I was taught these basic principles in grade school and as far as I know they are still the basic tenets being taught today.  However, I wonder at the effectiveness or the veracity of such statements when I view the vast majority of scholarly and academic work today.  In reading my own compositions as well as others it has become plain to me that many have departed from this standard.  How many true topic sentences does one see anymore?  Furthermore, to maintain that the composition of paragraph structures should be the guiding force in the creation of a work seems to me to encourage compositional structure more than content.  Obviously, these are good guidelines and students need to be taught something to start with, however, I believe that as a writer progresses what he is saying should be more of the focus than how he is saying it.  Placing this in the realm of rhetoric I feel that while this is an interesting and valuable piece in our rhetorical history and certainly worth studying and teaching, we need to temper it as a writer progresses with alternate means of composition so as to provide a truly holistic view of people’s writing styles.  In that way, we will not limit ourselves to one accepted mode of writing and hopefully this will enable us to look more at content of a work and less on its form.