Someone recently asked me if I really need to know all this stuff. Isn't writing about the act — the part where you sit very still and generate words? At the time, my answer was only a dirty look and the assurance that yes, I really did need to know all of this. But hark! Once again, the Poulakoses have come to my rescue:

If painters and potters become better artists by learning more about paint and clay, respectively, speakers and writers can only stand to improve their linguistic repertoire by learning more than they already know about language, the ways it is used, the forms in which it may be put, the meanings it can set in motion and the potential effects it might have. Knowledge of the medium of an art, then, is indispensable to the art at hand. Yet an art is much more than its medium. Accordingly, there can be no rhetoric without language; and even though all language is rhetorical, language and rhetoric are not the same thing. …(89—90)