Dancing with our siblings: The unlikely case for a rhetoric major

If the overall thrust of this book is to account for the possibility of a "writing major," it takes its place alongside other anthologies (for example, Shamoon, Howard, Jamieson, and Schwegler's Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum) and special issues of composition journals (the spring 2007 edition of Composition Studies, for example). My own take on the major writing curriculum is grounded by my belief that the rhetorical tradition is integral to the research agenda for composition studies, useful for composition pedagogy (in the service and major curricula), and foundational to our claims of disciplinarity. Rhetoric is part of our future and integral to our past. As such, this essay builds upon my own enthusiastic contribution to Coming of Age (written with Arthur Walzer), an essay that argued for courses in rhetorical theory in the writing curriculum.