When it was first published in 1982, A Rhetoric of Argument developed a ground-breaking new approach to teaching argument. The stasis approach pioneered by Fahnestock and Secor distinguished among the 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 readings by other writers and to construct their own arguments.