Writing & Rhetoric (Classical Academic Press): A Rubric Review

Writing & Rhetoric is the most faithful, accessible Progymnasmata curriculum in the modern homeschool market. It makes a 2,500-year-old pedagogical tradition genuinely teachable in a 21st-century home.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Classical Progymnasmata, graded imitation-and-composition exercises
Worldview	Christian-classical (source passages from Scripture, Aesop, classical mythology, church history, Western canon)
Grades	3-12 across thirteen books
Formats	Print student and teacher editions; streaming video courses
Cost tier	Standard
Parent intensity	3 (moderate parent-led; lower with video)
ESA-common	Yes (where Christian curriculum is approved)
Accredited	No
Established	Series launched 2013 by Paul Kortepeter; Classical Academic Press publishes
Website	classicalacademicpress.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	5	Honors-track college-prep writing; books 11-13 reach upper-division-college rhetoric
Ease of teaching	3	Discussion is real work; video supplement reduces parent load substantially
Content quality	5	Source passages well-chosen, lessons well-structured, voice respectful of student
Flexibility	3	Works as a primary writing spine; pairs with any reading or grammar program
Value for money	4	Mid-tier per book; substantial total investment over the full thirteen-book path
Worldview scope	2	Christian framing is structural in source-text selection, not cosmetic
Visual/design	4	Clean, dignified book design; CAP's editorial standard is high
Support resources	4	Mature video catalog; active classical-school adoption gives community depth

Who the publisher is

Classical Academic Press is one of the central publishers in the classical-Christian homeschool and university-model school world, known for Latin for Children, The Art of Argument, and the Writing & Rhetoric series. The company is based in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and has built its reputation on making genuinely classical pedagogy accessible to home and co-op educators without requiring them to have classical degrees themselves.

Writing & Rhetoric launched in 2013 under the authorship of Paul Kortepeter, with subsequent volumes adding co-authors as the series expanded. The full series now spans thirteen books, Fable, Narrative I, Narrative II, Chreia & Maxim, Refutation & Confirmation, Common Topic, Encomium & Vituperation, Comparison, Description, Thesis Part 1, Thesis Part 2, Declamation, and Advanced Declamation. The exercises are drawn from the ancient Greco-Roman Progymnasmata, the sequence of preliminary exercises classical orators used to learn rhetoric. Writing & Rhetoric updates and modernizes the sequence for 21st-century students using English-language source passages.

The series is now the flagship classical writing program in most classical-Christian co-ops and university-model schools. It is the standard curriculum at Veritas Press homeschool families, Classical Conversations-adjacent households who want a non-CC writing path, Memoria Press-leaning schools, and many ACCS day schools that need a homeschool-compatible composition track. The cultural register is warm, literate, and evangelical in the C.S. Lewis idiom, the source passages are drawn from Scripture, Aesop's fables, classical mythology, church history, medieval literature, and the Western canon.

The core pedagogy

Writing & Rhetoric teaches composition through imitation. The student reads a model passage, a fable, a historical narrative, a maxim, an encomium of a virtue, a description, and then practices specific writerly moves on it: paraphrasing, expanding, condensing, restructuring, retelling from a different angle, refuting it, defending it, comparing it to another passage. Each book in the series focuses on one or two of the ancient Progymnasmata exercises, building competence through repeated practice on varied source material.

The pedagogical bet, well supported by cognitive research on expertise (Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice; Daniel Willingham on novice cognition), is that beginners learn complex craft faster by imitating exemplars than by expressing themselves from scratch. A novice who has imitated, expanded, condensed, and restructured fifty fables and narratives has internalized rhetorical moves the way a musician internalizes scales. By the time the student reaches the higher books, they are deploying argumentative and compositional patterns fluently rather than improvising structure each time.

Signature mechanics: (1) Source-passage imitation, every lesson begins with a high-quality model passage that the student reads, discusses, and works on through specific exercises. (2) Progymnasmata progression, the thirteen books move through the ancient exercises in sequence, with each book building on the previous. (3) Discussion as pedagogy, the teacher's edition includes substantial discussion prompts; this is not a workbook program, it is a discussion program with written output. (4) Optional video course, CAP's streaming video offers Kortepeter and other CAP teachers presenting each lesson, which substantially reduces parent load for households without classical training.

A day in the life

A fifth-grader working through Writing & Rhetoric Book 3: Narrative II spends roughly 30-45 minutes on a writing day, three or four days per week. The week opens with reading the model passage aloud, a historical narrative or expanded fable, and discussing it with the parent (10-15 minutes). The student works through the imitation exercises: paraphrasing the passage in their own words, expanding it with additional detail, restructuring it from a different point of view (15-25 minutes per session). By week's end, the student has produced a polished narrative piece that imitates the structural moves of the source. Discussion time, especially in the early weeks of a book, is real, the parent is teaching the moves, not just assigning them.

A ninth-grader working through Writing & Rhetoric Book 8: Comparison runs longer sessions (45-60 minutes), produces longer pieces (full essays comparing two figures, two arguments, two passages), and engages the teacher's edition's deeper discussion prompts. By this point in the series, the student is reading and writing at a level that prepares them for college-level argumentation. Households using the video course shift much of the discussion work to the on-screen instructor; parents check the work and engage on substantive questions rather than presenting the lesson themselves.

What they do exceptionally well

Faithful Progymnasmata pedagogy. Writing & Rhetoric is the most faithful Progymnasmata curriculum in the modern homeschool market. Other classical writing programs (Lost Tools of Writing, Classical Composition) approach the tradition differently; Writing & Rhetoric stays closer to the ancient sequence and modernizes only the surface. For families who want genuine classical pedagogy rather than classical aesthetics, this matters.

Source-passage quality. Kortepeter's selection of model passages is consistently strong. Aesop, Bible, classical mythology, Plutarch, medieval saints' lives, Shakespeare, Lincoln, the passages are short enough to imitate but rich enough to reward analysis. Students who complete the series have read substantial primary-source material as a byproduct of working through the writing exercises.

Output that other programs do not produce. Students who complete Writing & Rhetoric tend to write with rhetorical moves, restatement, encomium structure, comparison structure, refutation-then-confirmation, that peers from other writing programs simply do not deploy. They also tend to be better readers, because the imitation work is reading work. The combination of literary breadth and compositional fluency is unusual.

Mature video catalog. CAP's video courses for Writing & Rhetoric have matured substantially over the past decade. The on-screen instruction is high-quality, the production values are good, and the option meaningfully lowers parent load for households without classical training. This is not a tacked-on supplement; it is a real alternative to parent-led teaching.

What they do poorly

Christian framing is structural. The source-passage selection is load-bearing. Aesop is paired with Scripture, classical mythology is paired with church history, Plutarch is paired with medieval saints' lives. Substituting out the Christian content does not produce a shorter program; it produces a different program. Secular families who use Writing & Rhetoric are doing real work to substitute, and the curriculum's logic resists clean substitution.

Assumes basic writing competence by Book 3. The early books (Fable, Narrative I) work for second- and third-graders with a parent who handles the writing mechanics. By Book 3, the program assumes the student can produce sentences and paragraphs without heavy mechanics remediation. Students who arrive in middle school still struggling with sentence-level writing should remediate first (Writing with Ease, IEW, or a structured-writing program) before entering or continuing Writing & Rhetoric.

Cost over the full path. Each book is moderately priced, but the full thirteen-book sequence, student edition plus teacher edition for each, runs $400-$600 over ten years, plus $60-$100 per book if the family adds video courses. Total invested in the full path with video can exceed $1,500. For a single-student household, this is real money; for multi-student households reusing teacher editions across siblings, the per-student cost is much more reasonable.

Discussion-heavy by design. This is not a workbook program. The Teacher's Edition assumes the parent or instructor is leading discussion of the model passages and the student's drafts. Households where the parent does not have time for discussion or the inclination to lead it should add the video course or accept that the program will run thinner than designed.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Writing & Rhetoric if: you are a classical-Christian household and want the most faithful Progymnasmata curriculum available; you want honors-track or college-prep-serious writing instruction; you have a student who responds well to being taken seriously and is ready for adult-tone instruction; you are in a co-op where the book's structure maps cleanly to a weekly class; you want a writing program grounded in Western tradition rather than expressive-voice contemporary instruction.

• Skip Writing & Rhetoric if: you are firmly secular and don't want to do significant content substitution; your student is still struggling with basic sentence and paragraph mechanics; you want a workbook program with minimal discussion; you want a single-book or one-year program rather than a multi-year sequence; your budget cannot support thirteen books over ten years; you want a creative-voice or reluctant-writer-friendly program.

Cost honest assessment

As of April 2026, Classical Academic Press lists Writing & Rhetoric Student Editions at roughly $24 each and Teacher's Editions at the same price, both books typically purchased for a household using the program. Combined Student-and-Teacher Programs run $46-$57 each on the publisher site. Books 1 through 11 are the standard sequence covering grades 3-9 or 3-10 depending on pace; Books 12 and 13 (Declamation and Advanced Declamation) cover advanced rhetoric for upper high school. Optional video courses add roughly $60-$120 per book.

A typical year uses one or two books. Full-series investment across grades 3-12 is roughly $400-$600 for print materials, plus $600-$1,400 if the family uses video for every book. Compared to alternatives: Lost Tools of Writing runs $79 for the basic level program. Classical Composition stages list from $51.90 to $106.90 each on the Memoria Press page in October 2026. IEW Theme-Based Writing Lessons range $50-$150 per level. Writing & Rhetoric sits at the standard tier for classical-Christian writing programs.

ESA eligibility notes

Writing & Rhetoric is approved on most state ESA marketplaces where Christian curriculum is permitted, including Arizona ClassWallet, Florida Step Up For Students, Iowa Student First Scholarship, and Utah Fits All. Classical Academic Press has historically been a routine vendor on Christian-permissible ESA marketplaces, with ordering workflows that handle direct vendor reimbursement on most platforms. States that restrict religious materials may limit eligibility for the biblical-source-passage portions of the curriculum; ESA-funded families should verify status on their state marketplace.

Alternatives

• Lost Tools of Writing, a family would pick Lost Tools over Writing & Rhetoric because Lost Tools is also classical and Christian but uses a single repeated five-canon framework rather than a multi-book progymnasmata sequence, which suits households that want one method applied repeatedly rather than thirteen books.
• Classical Composition (Memoria Press), a family would pick Classical Composition over Writing & Rhetoric because Classical Composition follows the Progymnasmata more strictly and uses different source-text choices, which suits Memoria-Press-aligned households or those wanting a different cultural register.
• Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), a family would pick IEW over Writing & Rhetoric because IEW's structured-and-stylized methodology is more accessible to non-classical households and reluctant writers, with strong video support that does not require classical alignment.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Classical Academic Press public site, the Writing & Rhetoric series page for current product structure and pricing, and the publicly available samples and scope-and-sequence materials. We cross-referenced against Cathy Duffy Reviews, classical-Christian co-op reading lists, and CAP's published statements on the series' pedagogy. Prices cited reflect publisher listings as of April 2026.