Editing Inventio (section)

==Purpose==
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According to Crowley and Hawhee, invention is the division of rhetoric that investigates the possible means by which proofs can be discovered. It supplies the speaker and writers with sets of instructions or ideas that help them to find and compose arguments that are appropriate for a given rhetorical situation.<ref>Crowley and Hawhee, 20.</ref>

For personal and lyric essays, narratives, and descriptive writing, invention techniques help writers draw from their memory and observation for the kinds of details that will add depth to their essays.<ref name=Glenn2008 />{{rp|151–156}}

The first direction of invention aims toward deriving heuristic procedures or systematic strategies that will aid students in discovering and generating ideas about which they might write; the second direction of invention is characterized by how writers establish "voice" in writing and realize individual selves in discourse.<ref name=Glenn2008/>{{rp|153}}

One of the oldest criticisms of rhetoric is that as an art it has no proper subject matter. In other words, an orator might speak on any topic, with his success being measured purely on the brilliance of his rhetorical skills. This aspect of rhetoric is one reason why [[Plato]] attacked what he saw as empty rhetoric on the part of [[sophist]] philosophers such as [[Gorgias]].

[[Aristotle]], in his works on rhetoric, answered Plato's charges by arguing that reason and rhetoric are intertwined ("Rhetoric is the counterpart of [[Dialectic]]" is the first sentence of his ''Rhetoric''). In Aristotle's view, dialectical reasoning is the mechanism for discovering universal truths; rhetoric is the method for clarifying and communicating these principles to others. And in order to communicate effectively, an orator must be able to assemble proper arguments that support a thesis.

''Inventio'', therefore, is the systematic discovery of rhetorical practices. In the Greek and Roman traditions, rhetorical practices are often but not always arguments. Aristotle, as well as later writers on rhetoric, such as [[Cicero]] and [[Quintilian]], devoted considerable attention to developing and formalizing the discipline of rhetorical invention. Two important concepts within invention were topoi and stasis. Other rhetorical cultures seem to have additional means of locating "available means". Historian of [[Celts|Celtic]] poetics [[Robert Graves]] credited [[analepsis]] as a method of inventing his historical arguments in ''[[The White Goddess]]'', and the [[Mazatec people|Mazatec]] [[medicine woman]] [[Maria Sabina]] credited the hallucinogenic [[psilocybe]] mushroom with the flow of her discourse. The philosopher Jacques Derrida described ''inventio'' as the "invention of the other."

[[Janice Lauer]] proposes that invention should be: (1) applicable to a wide variety of writing situations so that they will transcend a particular topic and can be internalized by the student; (2) flexible in direction allowing a thinker to return to a previous step or skip to an inviting one as the evolving idea suggests; and (3) highly generative by involving the writer in various operations—such as visualizing, classifying, defining, rearranging, and dividing—that are known to stimulate insights.<ref name=Glenn2008/>{{rp|155}}