'In theory these kinds of composition are distinct, but in practice two or more of them are usually combined. The purpose of argument is to influence opinion or action, or both. The purpose of exposition is to make the matter in hand more definite. The purpose of narration is to tell a story. The purpose of description is to bring before the mind of the reader persons or things as they appear to the writer. 'The four kinds of composition that seem to require separate treatment are: Description, which deals with persons or things Narration, which deals with acts or events Exposition, which deals with whatever admits of analysis or requires explanation Argument, which deals with any material that may be used to convince the understanding or to affect the will.

Adams Sherman Hill on the 'Kinds of Composition' (1895).(Kimberly Harrison, Contemporary Composition Studies. For example, Sharon Crowley (1984) faults the modes for focusing only on text and writer, ignoring the audience, and thus being 'arhetorical.'' 'In light of current composition theory, problems with the modes of discourse as a guiding principle of composition pedagogy are numerous. Thus early proponents of the modes of discourse assumed that one should choose a form of discourse according to the 'faculty' to be influenced and based on laws of association. Associationist psychology contends that we know the world through the grouping, or association, of ideas, which follows basic 'laws' and order. Faculty psychology assumes the mind is governed by the 'faculties' of understanding, imagination, passion, or will. 'The modes are faulted for relying on faculty and associationist psychology. They actually are grounded in certain philosophic concepts of the nature of reality considered as being or becoming.' 'These four modes of discourse are not an application of the communication triangle.

However in a given discourse there will often be. In actuality, it is impossible to have pure narration, etc. 'No theory of modes of discourse ever pretends that the modes do not overlap.

Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory And Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. However, even though the discourse may include all of the modes, it is common to use one of the modes to organize the discourse, as is suggested by the title of one of Kinneavy's textbooks: Writing: Basic Modes of Organization, by Kinneavy, Cope, and Campbell.' For instance, to write about a monarch butterfly we may narrate about the butterfly (e.g., trace its migration north in the spring or its life cycle), describe the butterfly (orange and black, about three inches wide), classify it (species, Danaus Plexippus, belonging to the family Danaidae, the milkweed butterflies, order Lepidoptera) and evaluate it ('one of the most beautiful and best known of butterflies'). A typical discourse, then, may make use of all the modes. considered as one dimension of a subject, a way of viewing the subject as static or dynamic, abstract or concrete. As writing displaced oral rhetoric, the older insistence on a single argumentative purpose did not serve, and in 1866 the desire for a multimodal rhetorical system was met by Alexander Bain, whose English Composition and Rhetoric proposed the multimodal system that has remained to this day, the 'forms' or 'modes' of discourse: narration, description, exposition, and argument.'

Teachers were coming to prefer books that offered concrete treatment of the different sorts of communication aims obviously served by writing. were supplementing Whatelian argumentative rhetoric with other modes. 'Beginning with Samuel Newman's Practical Systems of Rhetoric of 1827, American rhetoric textbooks.

Mode of dis meaning