Kinneavy on Referential and Persuasive Discourse: A Critique

Since its publication in 1971, James Kinneavy's A Theory of Discourse has been widely praised by such leading rhetorical theorists as E. P. J. Corbett, Jim Corder, Frank D'Angelo, and Ross Winterowd.' Recently it has provided the conceptual basis for several modern textbooks2 as well as for individual courses and composition programs.3 It is now part of the canon any wellprepared college composition teacher must know. Yet it has gained this eminence while being subject to little serious criticism.4 Before building textbooks, courses, or syllabuses around Kinneavy's views, we should examine his claims seriously. A Theory of Discourse develops two central ideas: first, that all discourse can be usefully divided into four types. Instead of Bain's now traditional classification, Kinneavy proposes a much more elegant and consistent paradigm, asserting that one of four elements becomes dominant in any communication. This paradigm makes intuitive sense, and it is far superior to Bain's overlapping categories. But it would not have taken a long and erudite book to explain this paradigm; in fact Kinneavy presented it clearly in an eight-page article in this journal in December of 1969.5 more significant claim in the book, the one on which entire programs in composition can be built, is that The aim of a discourse determines everything else,' specifically the discourse's structure, its logic, and its style.' idea that aim controls these three features of a discourse is Kinneavy's theory, as distinct from his four-part paradigm. To the extent that the theory is sound, Kinneavy has given us a powerful taxonomical, pedagogical, and interpretive tool. I maintain, however, that Kinneavy fails to provide compelling support for the theory and that a number of this specific assertions fail to hold up under examination.