Abstract
My hope in this paper is to supply a listing and description of invention components as well as their potential applications. Invention is defined as the process whereby writers discover ideas to write about, and inventionist refers to those who focus on this discovery process, whether that focus be pedagogical or theoretical. Ordinarily, an emphasis on invention is equated with an interest primarily in heuristic procedures.2 However, in this paper I will view heuristics as one of seven items that are implicit in the process of invention or discovery. Though it is clear, from composition texts and the theoretical work inventionoriented texts may be indebted to, that invention involves more than heuristics (e.g., Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Young, Becker, and Pike), it would be helpful to attempt to describe more explicitly the various constituents of invention and to show why such explicitness is of value. Such a of invention components would have a number of possible uses. One obvious use, though certainly not a major one, would be to allow those of us with a strong inventionist bent in our approach to composition to arrange in an orderly and retrievable fashion the many articles and books that treat the subject of invention and the composing process. Let me first merely list the catalogue items: motivation, ritual, perception, language and perception, heuristics, investigation, and character. This division of items is not intended to be viewed as a natural ordering of the invention stage or to imply that invention itself is a temporally prior step in the composing process. The items, however, are intended to be seen as logically related to each other.
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 1982-09-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/376658
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
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