Normative Rhetoric

I was struck by how the rise of and eventual preeminence of teaching grammar in rhetoric-composition classes is a fascinating and logical conclusion of a history of normative theories in rhetoric. Going back to Cicero, much of the emphasis in rhetorical theory has been about making people better at using rhetoric rather then theorizing how or why rhetoric works. In many ways, grammar seems to me to be the logical conclusion of this. If we conceive of the purpose of a rhetoric class as being to get people to write better (since writing by the end of the 19th had eclipsed speaking in primacy) and we look at students and see the primary problem as being terrible grammar, then its only logical to make the teaching of grammar central. In this way, normative rhetoric contributed to the demise of rhetoric as a whole.