Someday, of course, the composing process may become an open book. I hope not though. Style manifested in the written product-this, then, is where I believe our rhetorical efforts should focus. I shan't go into all that this entails in the classroom-the forging of effective sentences, the use of creative punctuation, the control of tone, the balancing of the rhetorical demands of a given writing situation. So I suggest that Ramus was right, after all.
Rhetoric does deal essentially with style.
But not just with the style of tropes and schemes. We need a twentieth-century Ramus to help us understand and to some extent systematize a modern style, a modern rhetoric, based on modern printed prose, aimed at modem readers, treating modem ideas. We can still learn much from Aristotle, especially in the field of effective oratory. But for effective writing, we should selectively prune and modify Aristotle to take full advantage of the visual power of print. I by no means wish to minimize the importance of sound in prose, the rhythms and stresses that hit a reader's inner car.