A Conceptual Rhetoric of the Composition

LET'S ASSUME that the expository paper-the sort of paper most of our students are going to be writing most of the time-has some central, unifying concept to it. Or more realistically, let's assume the instructor wishes there to be some such central concept. It seems to me then that such a concept is analagous to the Topic Sentence of the paragraph, or to the base clause of the sentence-it is the bare necessity of exposition upon which all other structures in some sense depend. But let's go a little bit further. Let's hypothesize a sentence embodying the sort of concept just mentioned, the sentence in its turn serving as the Topic Sentence of a developed, but still rather general paragraph. If we can conceptualize such a structure, we end up, or so it seems to me, conceiving of what ought to be the first paragraph of that sequence of structurally related paragraphs called a composition.