Generative rhetoric is an essential part of any composition program or instruction in written language that begins with the preschool child and continues through the freshman year of college and beyond. Applying the principles of generative rhetoric to selected essays and student performance established the need to maintain the place of generative rhetoric in the freshman English program at the University of North Dakota. The program is a sequence of two courses, the first dealing with the structures of written discourse, concentrating on narration and description; the second on the strategies of written discourse as they apply to expository and persuasive prose. Problems in maintaining the program have arisen from the community's expectations of instruction in the basics, the use of unfamiliar jargon, and the faculty's lack of training in and disdain for teaching composition. To overcome these difficulties, two principles have been kept in mind: the focus of a freshman English course should never leave writing, and the process of teaching writing should be viewed holistically as beginning with the preschool child and never ending. If generative rhetoric along with sentence combining and other proven tactics were taught in the public schools, freshman English would not need to be a remedial program, but a college level course in the higher strategies of rhetoric and writing. (AEA)