The Thinkers Behind Modern Writing: From Aristotle to Today

Most of what we know about writing came from many people. Many techniques, like telling a story out of order or grouping ideas in threes, have no single inventor. They grew out of long traditions of teachers, preachers, and storytellers. When we cannot honestly name one source, we credit the tradition.

Some people did name ideas, write them down, and pass them on in ways that still shape how writers work. Here is a short guide to some of them, in rough order of time. We have included only the claims we could check against reliable sources.

Aristotle

The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote one of the most influential books on persuasion ever written, known as the Rhetoric. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes its influence on the art of rhetoric as unparalleled. Aristotle taught that persuasion comes through the speaker's character, the hearer's emotions, and the argument itself: ethos, pathos, and logos. He called rhetoric a counterpart to dialectic, the art of reasoned argument. In the third book of the Rhetoric, he turned to style, including metaphor, simile, and rhythm.

In his Poetics, Aristotle also wrote about what makes a story whole. In S. H. Butcher's public-domain translation: "A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end."

The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium

We do not know who wrote this Latin handbook. For centuries people believed Cicero wrote it. Scholars now doubt that. In his introduction to the work, the scholar Harry Caplan calls it the oldest Latin art of rhetoric preserved entire. It names the five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) and the grand, middle, and simple styles. Caplan also notes that it holds the oldest surviving formal study of figures of speech.

Cicero

The Roman statesman and orator Cicero wrote several works on speaking well. In his Orator, he said the eloquent speaker should be able to prove, to please, and to persuade, and he matched each of those aims to a level of style: plain, middle, and grand.

Quintilian

Quintilian was Rome's most respected teacher of Latin oratory in his day. Shortly before his death, he published the Institutio Oratoria, a twelve-book work on training a speaker from early childhood onward. He built his ideal around a definition he credited to Cato: the orator is "a good man, skilled in speaking." For Quintilian, eloquence without goodness was dangerous. That conviction still matters to anyone who writes to serve others.

Martianus Capella

In the fifth century, the North African writer Martianus Capella wrote an introduction to the seven liberal arts, framed as the wedding of Mercury and Philology. It became one of the most important school texts of the Middle Ages. Its books on grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric cover the three arts that later became known as the trivium.

Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric before he became a bishop and one of the church's great theologians. In On Christian Doctrine, a work the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates as begun in 396 or 397, he took up Cicero's three aims of the speaker: to teach, to delight, and to persuade. In its fourth book, he applies them to Christian preaching and teaching, and he insists that teaching comes first.

William Strunk Jr.

William Strunk Jr. was a professor of English at Cornell University. His short guide The Elements of Style, copyrighted in 1918, is now in the public domain. Two of its most famous lines are "Use the active voice" and "Omit needless words." He explained the second one this way: "Vigorous writing is concise." He added that this does not mean every sentence must be short, but "that he make every word tell." The quotations here come from that early public-domain text, which predates the later revised editions.

Kenneth Burke

The critic Kenneth Burke chose identification as the key term for his book A Rhetoric of Motives. In it, he wrote that one person is "identified" with another "insofar as their interests are joined." For writers, identification may be Burke's most useful idea. A writer who helps readers say, "That's me," has already begun to persuade them.

Dorothy L. Sayers

In 1947, Dorothy L. Sayers read a paper at Oxford called "The Lost Tools of Learning." She argued that the medieval trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric was meant to teach the tools of learning, before students applied them to subjects. Her essay later helped inspire the classical Christian school movement in the United States.

Wayne C. Booth

Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction was first published in 1961. Its publisher, the University of Chicago Press, says the book "transformed the criticism of fiction." It also notes that the book's terms, including "the implied author" and "the unreliable narrator," have become part of the standard critical lexicon. The book studies how authors guide readers through a novel.

Gérard Genette

In 1972, the French critic Gérard Genette published the study known in English as Narrative Discourse. Studying Proust's In Search of Lost Time, he set out three ways a story's telling can differ from its events: order, duration, and frequency. His book became a major work of narratology, the study of how stories are built.

Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow was one of the central figures in modern American composition studies. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught, calls his 1973 book Writing Without Teachers "a phenomenon." The university also notes that freewriting has long been linked with his name, though he did not invent it. His later books include Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, a fitting title for any author who sounds most like themselves when they talk.

Richard Lanham

Richard A. Lanham, of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote Revising Prose, which teaches a "Paramedic Method" for rescuing tangled sentences. Its core question is, "Who is kicking who?" In other words: find the real action and put it in a strong, active verb.

Virginia Tufte

Virginia Tufte, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, wrote Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Through more than a thousand example sentences, she showed that sentence structure is part of a writer's art.

Why these thinkers matter to us

At Legacy Publishing, we draw on this long conversation every time we study an author's voice. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric came to us from these teachers and many more. We are grateful to stand on their shoulders as we lead each author toward a book that sounds fully like them.