The rhetorical modes (also known as modes of discourse) are a broad traditional classification of the major kinds of formal and academic writing (including speech-writing) by their purpose: narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. First attempted by Samuel P. Newman in A Practical System of Rhetoric in 1827, the modes of discourse have long influenced US writing instruction and particularly the design of mass-market writing assessments, despite critiques of the explanatory power of these classifications for non-school writing.
Definitions
Different definitions of mode apply to different types of writing.
Chris Baldick defines mode as an unspecific critical term usually designating a broad but identifiable kind of literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre. Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic.
Frederick Crews uses the term to mean a type of essay and categorizes essays as falling into four types, corresponding to four basic functions of prose: narration, or telling; description, or picturing; exposition, or explaining; and argument, or convincing. This is probably the most commonly accepted definition.
Susan Anker distinguishes between nine different modes of essay writing: narration, or writing that tells stories; illustration, or writing that gives examples; description, or writing that creates pictures in words; process analysis, or writing that explains how things happen; classification, or writing that sorts things into groups; definition, or writing that tells what something means; comparison and contrast, or writing that shows similarities and differences; cause and effect, or writing that explains reasons or results; and argument, or writing that persuades.
Each fiction-writing mode has its own purposes and conventions. Literary agent and author Evan Marshall identifies five different fiction-writing modes: action, summary, dialogue, feelings/thoughts, and background. Author and writing-instructor Jessica Page Morrell lists six delivery modes for fiction-writing: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. Author Peter Selgin refers to methods, including these six: action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scene, and description.
Narration
The purpose of narration is to tell a story or narrate an event or series of events. This writing mode frequently uses the tools of descriptive writing (see below), but also exposition. Narration is an especially useful tool for sequencing or putting details and information into some kind of logical order, traditionally chronological. Working with narration helps us see clear sequences separate from other modes.
A narrative essay recounts something that has happened. That something can be as small as a minor personal experience or as large as a war, and the narrator's tone can be either intimate and casual or neutrally objective and solemn. Inevitably, a good part of narration is taken up with describing. But a narrative essay differs from a descriptive one in its emphasis on time and sequence. The essayist turns storyteller, establishing when and in what order a series of related events occurred.
Exactly the same guidelines that hold for a descriptive or narrative essay can be used for the descriptive or narrative paragraph. That is, such a paragraph should be vivid, precise, and climactic, so that the details add up to something more than random observations.
Examples of narration include:
Anecdote
Autobiography
Biography
Novel
Oral history
Short story
Travel literature
Description
The purpose of description is to re-create, invent, or visually present a person, place, event, or action so that the reader can picture that which is being described. Descriptive writing can be found in the other rhetorical modes.
A descriptive essay aims to make vivid a place, an object, a character, or a group. It acts as an imaginative guide to stimulate the thoughts of the reader in the form of allowing the mind to personally interact with what the writer has molded through literary enhancement of thoughtful impressions. The writer tries, not simply to convey facts about the object, but to give readers a direct impression of that object, as if they were standing in its presence. The descriptive writer's task is one of translation: he wants to find words to capture the way his five senses have registered the item, so a reader of those words will have a mental picture of it.