Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, Francis Christensen, ed. Bonniejean Christensen (1978)
The nine essays in this collection amount to a case for writing teachers to be scholars of their craft rather than to continue, by habit and institutional inertia, what Christensen calls the "school tradition" — a tradition he shows, by analysis of widely-esteemed twentieth-century writers, to be bankrupt. Three of the essays, two on sentence structure and one on paragraph structure, are invaluable examples of how one might bring grammar back into the "composition" classroom. If the approach Christensen recommends informed teacher training today, it would indeed mark a new rhetorical direction for American schools and colleges.