So one take-away from this reading is that there are many theories of invention, another
that there are several theories of pedagogical uses of invention.
So several questions: please
1. Choose one (!)
2. Respond to it
3. In the process of responding, connect to other posts responding to the same question.
First Question: Some say that it's better (i.e., more helpful) inside a course to focus on a *single* invention technique so that students "master" it completely. Others say that it's more helpful to design several intention strategies into the course, the idea being that different assignments call for different techniques and that not all students will thrive with a single model. What do you say, and why?
Second Question: How much should fyc students know about invention as a topic/content area? In most fyc classes, invention is taught as a part of process. It's not taught, in other words, as a content area, although, clearly, it could be. Should it? Yes, no, maybe, and why?
Third Question: You could make the argument that you all should know something about invention because each of you is claiming some expertise in rhetoric, and the rhetorical canons, are, well, canonical ;) How much about invention should TAs teaching fyc know, and why?
Fourth Question: So what's the relationship, if any, between/among invention, curriculum, and pedagogy? Does a given fyc curriculum lend itself to one or more specific invention techniques? If yes, can you give us an example and and rationale?
Looking forward. . .
ky
I'll take number one.
ReplyDeleteIn our book, on pp 121, Lauer writes "In art pedagogies, teachers provide students with strategies for invention and give guidance
throughout the composing process. Eras of discourse instruction have been marked by an emphasis on one or the other of these broad teaching approaches as Chapter 3 illustrates. Sometimes today, as in prior periods, instructors integrate all four pedagogies."
My personal take is that the best way to go in teaching invention strategies is to teach them and as much of the reasoning behind them. The reason I think one should try to accomplish both (as many actual strategies as fit and as much work behind them as fits), is because writing is writing, but not all invention strategies work for all genres, and all writers, at all times.
If students understand how invention works and have some examples to use, they can, one might hope, learn to use invention techniques to their own purposes--learn maybe to fuse them and revise them into new techniques of their own for their own purposes; thus "reinventing" them.
Lauer separates pedagogical inventional strategies into two categories based on purpose: “Is this pedagogy designed to help writers to create new knowledge (epistemic) and reach new insights and judgments? Or is its purpose to help writers find and deploy existing information and lines of argument to support theses or judgments already known?” (123) These are important questions for us as writing teachers and the answers affect our pedagogy. I wonder, is it necessary to explain these questions to our students in addition to supplying them with our rationale for answering them?
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Chapter 5, I found the variety of invention activities motivating and I thought critically about how I might incorporate some of them into my own pedagogical practices. However, I kept going back to this question: regardless of which inventional strategy I employ, should I teach my students invention, as Dr. Yancey states in Question 2, “as a topic/content area”? I can’t help but say “yes.” When I have the opportunity to meet one-to-one with my students, I often find that most of them readily accept the notion of the genius solitary writer. They draft with the mindset that their capacity to write well is an inherent ability reserved for the fortunate ones. I am consistently trying to challenge this attitude, and I’ve found success when I attempt to demystify the writing process for my students. Lfc suggests that we teach all of the inventional strategies in addition to “the reasoning behind them.” I agree. Therefore, I think it’s imperative to teach our students invention with the complementary objective of explaining to them what exactly invention is, why we use it, and how it works. (A little bit of theory and practice, yes?)
I think as teachers we should explicate why, for a particular assignment, we’re approaching invention in a collaborative setting as opposed to as individuals. I think we should discuss with our students how, in some situations, showing a model is more effective than relying on the students’ natural ability to produce a text, or vice versa. This approach, in my opinion, demonstrates to the students that writing is a process—and not a prescriptive one.
Again, I’m in agreement with what lfc said. Not every student will find success with every approach, so if we teach them a variety of strategies with the goal of explaining how different strategies works for different genres and different situations (and for different writers), then we discredit the “solitary writer as genius” perception.
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ReplyDelete4th question: Invention, invention instruction, and invention awareness seem necessary aspects of a pedagogy, especially one that lies within an fyc curriculum. Teaching many invention strategies seems a challenge that I don’t think I could do well, at least not in one semester. FYC classes go so fast (it’s midterm time already—yikes!) I think it might be more helpful to teach two or three invention techniques utilizing inquiry and reflection. These invention techniques can be heuristic or hermeneutic, and allow for possibilities of transfer. For example, Lauer’s description of inquiry-based invention, “helping [students] to frame guiding questions based on their own compelling puzzlements in genuine writing contexts; assisting them in taking different perspectives on their questions, in exploring ideas extensively, imaginatively, and critically; and in encouraging them to construct focuses that represent their new understandings” (135) is a strategy that students will have to work on over a series of projects to really “get” but once they get the hang of it, they may be able to easily apply it in a variety of situations that call for invention.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to address question 3, particularly in terms of a research writing course such as we teach here at FSU. I would argue that invention is quite possibly the most important concept for the FYC teacher to emphasize in a research writing class in which students are required to strike out in (to a reasonable extent) new directions, taking cues from and building upon a foundation of research. TAs should be aware of the many strategies available to a writer in composing a text, particularly in a course in which, I would argue, invention takes up the bulk of the writing process. As an example, I would point no further than the textbook we use here at FSU in teaching research writing: Bruce Ballenger’s The Curious Researcher.
ReplyDeleteBallenger’s textbook is full of invention strategies intended to help students formulate questions and analyze sources with the purpose of producing knowledge. A few examples that intersect with our reading in Invention this week can be found in Ballenger’s invoking of the “doubting game”, the same game that Lauer attributes to Peter Elbow, as well as Ballenger’s suggestion that students use a double-entry notebook, whose origin Lauer locates in Ann Berthoff’s The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers (Ballenger 120, 144; Lauer 129, 133). Perhaps no other example of the prominence of invention in this textbook is more noticeable than the book’s main theme: basing research writing on inquiry, an invention practice that Lauer attributes to George Hillocks (134). If research writing courses were to be envisioned as primarily about invention, that would necessarily entail thinking of invention as a “topic/content area”, something which I believe Jen more than successfully pointed at in her entry. Perhaps in research writing more than in any other writing course, TAs should be well-versed in the many strategies for generating ideas in and through writing.
Question 3
ReplyDeleteI believe it is critical for a TA teaching fyc to be familiar with (if not proficient) in theories of Invention and invention pedagogies. I absolutely agree with Jen’s observation that our students envision writing as a gift, something with which only a select few are blessed.
In Chapter 5, Lauer includes a brief definition of social-epistemic heurists as “helping students create new knowledge and reach new insights in their everyday experience” (135). For me (and this is something I stress to my students every time we discuss their papers), it is absolutely critical that writing extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom. They care more about their topics (and about writing in general) if they understand that they are not merely performing an exercise, but contributing to a greater body of knowledge. Even if they don’t completely alter perceptions within a given discourse community – academia included – they might change MY perception of a given topic or more importantly their own.
It is always necessary for us, as TAs, to keep these theories and conceptual frameworks in our classroom either in the background or the foreground. From this perspective, we can prevent ourselves from devaluing our students and their writing and gives our students a greater sense of purpose, which is critical in getting them to be passionate about and learn from their own writing.
Question 1:
ReplyDeleteI think it's really important that we teach more than one invention strategy for the simple reason that not every strategy works for every student or every writer, and I agree with Jen that some discussion about why we are doing a particular strategy or individual vs collaborative invention will further help students realize that their invention practices will likely change depending on the kind of writing being done.
It would also be prudent to teach invention in more than one place in an assignment. In my experience, too many teachers teach invention as a one time deal before you begin writing. We know that writing is recursive and we want our students to value drafting so building in moments between drafts and class instruction to further invent (and synthesize new material) will help them revise in a more fruitful way.
The key, though, with teaching more than one invention strategy is definitely a discussion about why that strategy is useful for that particular assignment, kind of writing, or moment in the writing process and working alone or with a group is best so that the choice seems deliberative instead of random, and then they can learn to make those choices for themselves.
I'm in agreement with Jen--teaching invention both as a concept and as a practice is essential. If we acknowledge (as Sharon Crowley posits 148) that invention is located within rhetorical situation, it follows that we would explain why a particular invention strategy might be useful for a specific writing situation. Much of student resistance to invention is, I think, centered on a misconception about the type of writing they are being asked to complete. As Lauer notes on 138, much of the writing assignments students encounter before and after our classes are not epistemic and will not, therefore, necessarily benefit from the types of invention strategies we often implement to help students create new knowledge. It does not surprise me, for instance, that students who come to us having been asked to complete multiple drafts, outlines and diagrams of 3-5 page informative reports do not find invention to be particularly helpful. In the same way, invention for a piece of fiction or poetry might benefit from a model like Elbow's, which allows invention to take place after writing while an argumentative essay might benefit from inquiry approaches. On a final note, what is the relationship between invention, knowledge production and visual rhetoric? Why have the invention strategies used in visual rhetoric not received more critical attention? Is invention less important in visual rhetoric? If so, does this mean that visual rhetoric does not produce knowledge in the same way that written and oral rhetoric do?
ReplyDeleteQuestion 2:
ReplyDeleteI tend to shy away from overloading my students with background information and specific terminology where it may not be helpful or beneficial to them. To that end, it's rare for me to approach the topic head on with something like, "So, this is what invention is and where it comes from and how you use it."
As graduate students, we come to the subject of invention (or any rhetorical concept) with years of writing experience that our students don't yet have. Indeed, when I broach the subject of rhetoric generally with my students, the most common reaction is a room full of blank stares. At best, one brave soul will venture "You mean a rhetorical question?"
It's a long road from that point to a meaningful discussion of the rhetorical canons. This isn't necessarily a road that isn't worth taking, but I frequently opt to explain what we're doing in familiar terms. I suspect that many, even most of the students who take fyc classes will not see much use in "the rhetorical canon of invention," whereas a good number of them may find useful "strategies for constructing an argument, discovering what you have to say, etc."
In other words, I think it's vitally important for fyc students to know how to do invention (yes, multiple strategies Q1), but not necessarily important for them to know what they are doing in specifically rhetorical terms. I certainly agree with Jen that making the process of writing transparent to our students is important, but I'm not sure this totally aligns with teaching invention as a content area specifically.
In response to question one:
ReplyDeleteI appreciated how Lauer set up a continuum of inventional strategies. She describes this continuum as existing between the algorithmic and the aleatory. This gestures to Leigh’s point that I absolutely agree with and that was part of my group’s (and other’s) definition at the beginning of the semester: invention is a recursive process. Why not teach it this way and frame it within their experience as authors both in and out of the classroom? At different points in a composing process our inventional strategies are a) going to fulfill different ends and b) need to be more or less directive depending on how much invention they need and where their goal is in the spectrum between creating new knowledge or employing what they already have.
The primary reason, however, that I would argue for teaching multiple inventional techniques is that students are going to engage in invention regardless of if we teach it to them or not. Their techniques are ideally honed, expanded, and made more efficient with our guidance. However, much of Lauer’s text, it seems, as been devoted describing and building on a skill that is already practiced by anyone composing. Invention is not something that students do not have when they enter a writing classroom and then gain. Thus, they are already practicing multiple invention strategies as they need them. So, why not tap into this reality of their process? Finally, this argument also weighs in with the sentiment of most of those who have posted before me that invention should also be taught as a content area. This, I think, would enable students not only with a framework for learning the invention techniques that we would teach them; but, it would also provide them with a reflective framework for evaluating and developing their own writerly identitiy in regards to invention.
Also in response to question one:
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think that it’s kind of pointless to ask students to practice inventing ideas to support theoretical arguments in which they are not personally invested and in a context in which there is no real audience whom the writers are attempting to persuade to think or act differently. Given that almost all composition courses ask students to practice the formation of rhetorical responses within these faux-rhetorical situations, however, I’d say, along with my colleagues who have posted previously on this issue, that it’s probably more useful to expose students to several invention strategies than it is to focus on only one because then, later, when they find themselves in a position to respond to some real rhetorical exigencies, it seems more likely that they’ll have been exposed to something that might help them generate the meaningful ideas they’ll wish to contribute at those times. Also, in response to others’ posts, I’d like to slide over into question two and agree that students have already engaged and are already engaging various invention strategies in their everyday lives, so foregrounding the invention strategies they have already applied and exposing them to other approaches they might also have used had they known about them (i.e. teaching invention as a topic) is useful, I think, because it provides the opportunity for students to think more analytically about what invention options are available to help them address those issues they’re already invested in responding to.
Question one:
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you all have written previously in response to this question. In particular, I agree with Katie's appreciation of the continuum Lauer describes. I imagine that if we travel along the continuum, we'll find that particular inventional acts are more conducive to particular rhetorical situations. As a result, we should take time as teachers to identify which acts of invention might be best for our students depending on the rhetorical situation to which they are responding (this is something to which I need to be more attentive). Of course, we should provide the students with enough wiggle room, so to speak, so that they may tweak the inventional act to work for them, but the ultimate point I think we're all making is that teaching one act of invention ignores the reality that different rhetorical situations require different responses, different ways of responding, and different ways of developing those responses. Gesturing to Ruth's post, I'd also like to add that teaching one inventional act neglects the flexibility our students will need as they partake in "real world" rhetorical situations.
One last note: Because I adopt what Berlin calls a social epistemic view of rhetoric (and, therefore, a social epistemic approach to pedagogy), it's been my tendency to allow each writing group to negotiate their own inventional practices. Yes, I later call upon each group to describe and discuss these practices, but I am mostly removed from how they start the process of developing/inventing a text. On one hand, this invites a range of inventional acts within the classroom, but after reading Lauer's text and recognizing invention as a content area, I wonder if I should be more engaged in each group's process of invention.
Everyone seems agreed that invention is important to teach and to understand-- my impression of the canon is all skewed and out of proportion but to what, I am not sure. now i think invention is the central and overarching term- Lauer is just that good- and thorough! But prior to this, I had Jim Porter's "Reclaiming Delivery" in my mind- then somewhere I got rhetorical memory and John McCain dissing Aisans-- style I have never really seen addressed, certainly not deeply- ant this is tainted with Whatley and current traditional flourishes? But I think of it as genre? and related to audience and Bitzer's rhetorical situation? which leaves arrangement and this is somewhat architectural, which loops me back to Simonides of Ceos and the fallen ceiling of the banquet hall-- which is memory... all by way of saying, for me-- I find a very large gap between the fan of five canons showed to me as relic of Greece and whatever they mean today, as resurrected and re-positioned to accommodated digital composition, etc.- to say nothing of their passage from ancient times all the way through the 1970s' open admissions universities and the metamorphosis of primarily civic speechmaking in favor of written discourse for commercial and other purposes.
ReplyDeleteWhat I mean to say, in answer to NUMBER 4:
pedagogically we teach "invention" which i mainly muddle together as understand your purpose/audience and brainstorm what to say. for this we have EXERCISES- such as looping, "Explode a Moment", "Show don't Tell" etc.--- and as Scott, or someone mentioned, Bruce Ballenger's Curious Researcher with variations of 20 questions-- OK. I can teach that. But I guess my point is that I still don't have a comprehensive definition of the canon and what/how they mean NOW compared to however they were used/meant something in the ancient academy. And--- I think First Year Comp could have more Comp theory and less American culture as its content.
Question two:
ReplyDeleteMy initial instinct is to say, “yes, of course we should teach invention as its own content area!” However, I wonder if to teach invention separate from the process is to take something fundamental away from invention itself. I agree with Jen: “I think it’s imperative to teach our students invention with the complementary objective of explaining to them what exactly invention is, why we use it, and how it works”, but, in addition, I think that without the context behind invention (the process and, with it, a rough sense of a goal and/or intent) we would be teaching them an abstraction devoid of use that freshmen students might have a difficult time conceiving of in concrete terms. I agree with Miriam that we should explain “why a particular invention strategy might be useful for a specific writing situation.” It would be much more difficult to teach the reasoning behind “Invention Strategy X” or “demystify” it without a concrete process/context. So I guess I’m saying that invention is defined by its utility; to “invent” outside of a process structure (however rudimentary, unclear and vague the goal might be or how non-linear the process is designed) is not invention at all. I agree with Stacy, though, that it’s “not necessarily important for them to know what they are doing in specifically rhetorical terms”, but if students are to see the value of invention in the larger sense, they need to see it as a necessary (and exciting) component of a larger process that they can actually use.
Like Elizabeth, I don't think there is any question that there is a strong, interlocking bond between pedagogy, curriculum, and invention strategies in the FYC classroom. As I see it, the curriculum and pedagogy often mandate each other (usually with the pedagogy mandating the curriculum, but in the case of a "strand" style like we have here at FSU, the curriculum is chosen based on the pedagogical preferences of the TA and then used as the frame on which to shape the pedagogical approach for that semester), and the methods of invention used/taught in a given course are informed by the curriculum/pedagogy.
ReplyDeleteTake the strand that I am doing in my 1101 class as an example, strand 4 - "A New Digital Literacy." This strand is heavy on discussions and analysis/critique of how computer technology and the internet affect literacy, writing, and identity. There is a technological component, and there is a cultural studies component. This pedagogical approach is thus reflected in the curriculum (the papers they write, the activities we do, the articles and essays we read, etc.). So, the intentional strategies are going to be a synthesis of mimesis, freewriting, and reflection, as we may see in other classes, but they're also going to consist of technological and dialogic exercises. In this way, the curriculum and pedagogy inform the approaches to invention.
Like most of you who have responded to Question 1, I too am a proponent of implementing several invention strategies. For starters, I’m of the persuasion that it’s nice to have options; moreover, the idea of having students master one invention strategy seems far too prescriptive, not to mention constraining, especially if, as Scott alludes to, that strategy isn’t conducive to the rhetorical situation at hand. While some strategies could be applied to many rhetorical situations, I think we can agree that certain strategies are more effective when grounded in specific situations. What’s more: students are going to want to partake in invention strategies with which they feel comfortable and that align with their composing process. And perhaps that’s one item we’ve overlooked thus far: invention strategies can be highly individual and become personalized. As Katie suggests, many of our students are probably already bringing with them to the classroom their own invention strategies—they probably just don’t refer to them in those terms. If that’s the case, perhaps a portion of our efforts should be geared toward helping students understand what all can be included in an act of invention and how they can tweak their invention practices in ways that allow them to capitalize on these practices inherent potential.
ReplyDeleteThat said, students are also creatures of habit, particularly when it comes to writing, and unfortunately, many of the habits they’ve acquired or been inculcated with prior to college are misinformed and/or counterproductive. Consequently, I find it important not only to make clear the importance of invention strategies but also to introduce students to strategies with some pedagogical backing (even if that backing is in the form of lore). Like Leigh, I feel we need to emphasize as well that invention isn’t something that occurs at the beginning of the composing process but rather throughout: as Katie says, acts of invention are recursive. Thus, in exposing our students to multiple invention strategies, we help them to see the many ways in which invention assists them throughout the act of composing.
In my classroom, I schedule at least one invention-based activity per week, and these activities run in various ways. For instance, sometimes students work individually, while other times, they work collaboratively in groups (and when they work in groups, they vary groups so as to work with different people each time). In addition, they’ll write, discuss orally, compose visually, and/or compose multimodally. We also use strategies for different stages of the process. In short, I not only support a mutli-inventional approach; I attempt to foster one.
At this point it become almost silly to point to the people I agree with. I wanted to tackle question one, but my answer includes a lot of what people are mentioning in other questions as well. We all appear to be saying that what we need to teach is RHETORICAL use of invention. We want to teach our students to fish, not just give them a fish. We want to teach them strategies (whatever those may look like for each of us personally) that they can then employ in their future classes. I think this becomes a bit of teaching them how to use invention and teaching them the content of invention. Most of our posts seem to be saying that we wouldn’t necessarily give our students a theoretical investigation of invention to discuss and reflect on; however, we tend to be leaning towards offering them some kind of content-based background on the notion of invention so they can better utilize it for the rest of their writing endeavors (in rhetorically effective ways). I would have to agree with this. There are a multitude of strategies available and a multitude of learners in our classes. However, for me, this jack-of-all-trades approach breaks down when we get to the topic of epistemological support. We must eventually discuss with our students the epistemological structures undergirding our inventional practices. This is when it becomes sticky in an fyc class. I think such discussions are more than possible in an upper level course; however, I am still unsure how we go about discussing the underlying epistemologies inherent in certain writing practices with freshmen .
ReplyDeleteGoing last is nice in that you can pull from colleagues' material, but difficult in that most of the smart things have already been said.
ReplyDeleteAs for invention as a topic area (at least at the FYC level), I don't think so. It's hard enough for me to slog through this text and I have little reason to think that FYC students would benefit from that.
That being said, I agree wholesale with Scott/Stacey/Jen's contention that invention should be taught as PRAXIS-- that is, practice informed by theory. Josh is right-- unless you're doing rhetorical theory/history/etc (and maybe even then)-- divorcing invention from practice is to take away from invention what's worth knowing. Does teaching invention as practice involve a little content? Yeah, probably. But more important, I think, is to enact several inventional strategies (as Elizabeth points out) towards a specific rhetorical purpose (Scott, Marian) and to then learn (ie Berthoff's"form structures") about that enaction through reflection (Yancey). I agree with Jen that we should make it explicit why and how we're approaching invention, but that "wiggle room" (Scott) is essential for students to discover what works for them.
I've found that through praxis + reflection, the specific terminology we need (Stacey) develops and we come to learn that invention (as collective/individual; hermeneutic/heuristic; aleatory/algorithmic; epistemic/imitative; etc/etc) is most useful in and for a specific situation.
I’m going to join into the conversation that Jen began with question #2. I think that (obviously) we have learned with Lauer’s book that invention is important—both to study and to implement into our pedagogy. However, if we decide that it should be taught as a content area than we would need to define what the overall content of the course would be, in other words, where or how should invention fit into the overall content of a FYC course. Thus, I think we would need to answer some questions: what do you want the students to walk knowing? What knowledge do you want them to have? What is the important vocabulary (e.g. key terms) to teach them? Deciding that invention is indeed a key term would mean a shifting of sorts because often we teach invention without defining it as invention: we give our student invention exercises but don’t tell them that this is an act of “invention” nor do we define invention as one of the rhetorical canons. Stacey mentions that she doesn’t like to overload her students with background information, but I believe if we want students to fully understand a rhetorical concept than they must read the theory behind it (thus also know the language). By reading the theory behind invention, it gives students opportunity to grapple with and come to an understanding of terms they are unfamiliar with. This would support Lauer’s first pedagogical inventional category, which questions if the pedagogy is designed to help writers “create new knowledge (epistemic) and reach new insights and judgments.” Asking students to read theory on invention creates the opportunity for them to reach new insights—based on their own understanding of the theory. The next step would be to have them put their understanding into practice or—in other words—to have them enact their understanding in their own writing process. If we decide that invention should be part of the content of FYC then we need to teach it as a key term and then treat it as a term that students can understand and then put into practice.
ReplyDeleteQuestion 1:
ReplyDeleteI like the quote "lfc" uses to describe how teachers in our field incorporate multiple invention strategies. I was a little confused as to what "lfc" means when saying "writing is writing," though. I think writing is just as complicated, if not more, as invention. That being said, I also believe that fyc instructors should teach students more than one invention strategy, allowing room for other disciplines to reinforce their preferred strategies. I also liked Leigh's suggestion: that we teach invention in more than one place during the writing process. I would also like to suggest that we should also model invention in our classroom and outside of our classroom (more like using "discovery" as invention).
Kendra
I think the idea in our own pedagogy program is very much based in the invention strategy of freewriting. It is not the exclusive strategy, but it is the most often used, I would guess. Freewriting is a practice that students find easy to do, and teachers can easily direct regardless of level of experience. Perhaps that's why we gravitate toward it. I don't think we balance that freewriting with enough other strategies of invention; freewriting is an excellent strategy for some types of writing, some genres, and some writers. But it is not the only strategy and it doesn't work for everyone. If we understand the theories behind writing and then the strategies we can use to invent, we can better teach those strategies and that theory to students, who can learn to apply the theory and strategy to their writing beyond our classroom. It's the variety of strategies that will be beneficial to our students in helping them write beyond us - if they learn the strategies they'll be better writers for film class, or their history of religion class, or learning to write lab reports for criminology or biology. Isn't that the job of FYC? If we stick to mostly freewriting, we're helping students understand what they, as writers, want to get out, and it ties in well to the style of personal writing we do here particularly in 1101. But other strategies of invention must be added to their repertoire as writers if they are to improve. Like Michael Carter's "Ways of Knowing" implies about writing knowledge, there's a metacognitive difference between knowing that and knowing how - knowing that is what makes students able to meet an assignment, knowing how is what makes them understand why they are doing whatever they are doing to meet the assignment, and it gives them agency, as writers now and for future situations.
ReplyDeleteKara and Natalie approach the question I am asking- Matt kind of makes this point too--- and I'm sure all of us want to get a grip on how much theory to give, say freshman, but anyone really who is not in our graduate-level rhet/comp track.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be helpful (to me at least!) if we went over the FIVE canons and defined them succinctly, ranking them hierarchically if necessary-- or nesting them? HELP!
Also-- if we made a list of 10 (do we use that many distinct ones? Or is it more like six?) invention strategies as a seminar group- that we all use in our teaching. Sort of like an annotated bib, and following up/streamlining our discussion yesterday.