Something Further On The Rhetoric Stage Not Existing

It often happens that as I am working out some new idea, I post something and then delete it hours later when I realize there is far more to the idea than I initially estimated.

Suffice to say, I intend to argue at length before the summer is over that–at least so far as high school is concerned–there is no “rhetoric stage,” and that only the grammar stage exists.

The longer I mull this idea over, the more deeply it resonates with my seventeen years of teaching high school. The longer I think it over, the more it makes sense of why high school students write the way they do, reason the way they do.

Before saying anything else on the matter, I would like to form my thoughts and arguments a bit more. I’m anticipating a good deal of disagreement.