For some students, often boys, there is nothing worse than to be confronted with an open-ended writing. Classical education to the rescue! The mistake of many modern language arts classes is to fail to provide these reluctant writers with a template for organizing their ideas.
Inventio (Latin, invention) is the first of the five canons of rhetoric. It is a method for discovery what one wants to say, or more specifically, an approach that can help a person find how or what points they want to argue. It can be used for debate, but also for finding topics for papers, projects, and of course, open-ended writing prompts.
Two important devicesare:
Topos or Topics
Common topoi: comparisons of similarity, difference, or degree, definitions of things, divisions of things (whole / part), cause and effect, "hard evidence" like statistics
Special topoi: concepts such as justice or injustice, truth, or virtue.
Stasis - Helpful for clarifying issues in a debate
Did something happen?
What is its nature?
What is its quality?
What actions should be taken?
For examples of Inventio in action, look here.
Inventio at Wikipedia
Inventio at Wiki
Stasis at Everyday Writer
Rhetorica.net
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