Day defines three kinds of discourse based on the aspect of the rhetorical act featured by each: "In oratory . . . the exterior aim rules; in Representative Discourse, the matter; in Poetry, the form." While all three modes of discourse "represent" thought, the three kinds are delineated from one another by the feature of the rhetorical situation which dominates their composition: audience, subject, or form (al- though mixtures among these elements are possible in any given dis- course). That is, poetry and representative discourse differ from oratory in that they "drop the idea of a mind addressed as the ruling idea in the representation of thought"; representative discourse concerns itself no so much with an audience or structure as it does with presenting a subject clearly and distinctly; and poetry
Some later twentieth-century writers again elaborate the three-step model into a multi-stage process; for Rudolf Flesch, the process has five (or six) stages: 1. When you have collected your ideas, make a list of them. 2. Sort your ideas out in groups. Leave out those that don't belong. 3. Then put your ideas in order. A good order is this: a. Bait for your reader. b. Your subject in general. c., d. (e). Main body of your piece of writing, divided according to your point of view. e. or f. Main idea in a nutshell.
