The advent of writing in ancient Greece, shifting discourse from oral to written form, brought a new awareness—a control—of the arrangement of material. Studying the patterns of thought by which the western mind naturally moves, classical rhetoricians including Aristotle developed a system of topics for developing and organizing material, a system which, ideally, would “spontaneously follow the thought.” You are already familiar with these topics: they form the basis of our journal prompts. Burke likewise regards critical thinking as natural: “The heirarchic principle is inevitable in systematic thought. It is embodied in the mere process of growth, which is synonymous with the class divisions of youth and age, stronger and weaker, male and female, or the stages of learning, from apprentice to journeyman to master.”

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 141.
Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 103.
Quintilian. Qtd. in Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 95.