A Rhetoric of Argument: Brief

The stasis approach pioneered by Fahnestock and Secor distinguishes among four basic questions that arguments are written to answer:

What is it? (Definition arguments)
How did it get that way? (Causal arguments)
Is it good or bad? (Evaluation arguments)
What should we do about it? (Proposal arguments)

These four questions, now standard in many argument texts, give students a constructive, engaging way to analyze arguments by other writers and to construct their own arguments.