As Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, Hill oversaw and implemented curriculum that came to effect first-year composition in classrooms across the United States.

This cultural expansion, along with newly improved printing presses, helped give rise to the expanded usage of textbooks in American composition classrooms.

[8] This highly consumed, but less educated style of writing clashed, however, with that of nineteenth-century intellectuals, who considered criticism vital to defining and upholding the standards of taste.

As early as 1856, Hill vocalized about the dangers of "uneducated" newspaper journalists,[11] bemoaning the lack of control he as an "educated" man, was able to exert over the minds of his readers.

Hill's theories are deeply rooted in Current Traditionalist rhetoric, which at its heart involves a pedagogical focus on finding and correcting mechanical errors in writing.

The text ignores Invention, and like many current traditional textbooks, places a heavy focus on exposition, which, according to the current-traditionalists, sets up the rational and empirical evidence in order to appeal to reason and understanding.

Hill offers many examples and rules on proper usage, including the three main ideas that language must be: reputable, national, and present.

Hill believed that movement and method in narration are “the life and logic of discourse”,[21] a view that his journalist background may have helped develop.

[23] The substantial impact that The Principles of Rhetoric had was largely aided by Hill's position at Harvard, which, from 1875 to 1900, was the most influential English program in the United States.