Composition (language)

Oral discourse

Traditionally, oratory, or classical rhetoric, is composed of five stages, or canons:

• Invention, "the search of persuasive ways to present information and formulate arguments"
• Arrangement, "the organization of the parts of speech to ensure that all means of persuasion are present and properly disposed"
• Style, "the use of correct, appropriate, and striking language throughout the speech"
• Memory, "the use of mnemonics and practice of speech"
• Delivery, "the use of effective gestures and vocal modulation to present the speech"

Typically, in any speech classroom, these stages are still prevalent in the composing process. Other such qualities to be included, especially when considering ones' audience and methods of persuasion, would be the rhetorical appeals:

• Logos, appeals to logic and reason, evidence and support
• Ethos, appeals to ethics, the speaker's credibility, trustworthiness, and morals
• Pathos, appeals to emotion, connecting with audience through shared feelings
• Kairos, appeals to timing, presenting key information at the best moment, typically to persuade or to provoke action.

Written discourse

As oral discourse shifted to more written discourse, the stage of memory and delivery began to fade, yet the first three stages hold its rank in the writing process of most composition classrooms. The rhetorical appeals also prove important in written texts, as the strategies of using these appeals become more complex as writers understand their audience's needs when not in physical view.

Visual

While, strictly speaking, even a printed page of text is multimodal, the teaching of composition has begun to attend to the language of visuals. Some have suggested privileging only the linguistic mode limits the opportunity to engage in multiple symbols that create meaning and speak rhetorically. In thinking about how visuals are used to communicate, and how they are composed or analyzed in a rhetorical work, Foss argues that one considers:

• Nature, the present elements/physical features and suggested elements/concepts and ideas
• Function, the action it communicates
• Evaluation, assessed rhetorically

Foss, who acknowledges visual rhetoric, demonstrates that composition studies has to consider other definitions and incorporations of language.

Digital

This composition refers to work produced in digital spaces. The writer or speaker must not only consider all the composing processes of the above-mentioned discourse (like purpose, arrangement, etc.), but the relationship medium plays in the composing and decision process of that work. In digital discourse, the fifth canon of delivery takes on new meaning, and digital spaces change how traditional views of authority, circulation, and context are understood, like composing in a Wikipedia. Thus digital rhetoric, or eRhetoric offers new ways of composing.