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 arguments by other writers and to construct their own arguments.