Francis Christensen's Rhetoric Program stresses narrative-descriptive and expository writing, and offers a guide for the structure of the paragraph. In this approach, students develop their composition skills by writing sentences similar to model sentences that Christensen has extracted from the works of successful writers. The basic model is the cumulative sentence, which contains a short base or main clause with one or more "free" modifiers in the final position. From practice with this model, students learn to employ four principles: adding free modifiers, directing the movement of modification, exploring levels of generality, and improving the texture of writing with proper modification. (RL)