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Methods of Invention
Before you begin the actual writing, or drafting of your essay, you will need to narrow your topic to a focused
thesis, or main point, and then think of ideas, or specific content to support your point. This is called "prewriting."
Prewriting is the first stage of writing in which you generate ideas for your essay content.
One of the objectives of prewriting is to engage the "right side" of the brain, or the more creative side, and to hold at bay the
left side, or the more analytical and critical side, until you get some thoughts down on paper. You want to generate many ideas in the
prewriting stage -- later you can sift through them, evaluate them, and throw out the ones that won't work. For right now,
accept any and all ideas that come to you, and don't worry if they are "good" ones yet. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation,
or grammar at this stage of the writing process either. You want to assist your brain in the creative process and in producing
as many ideas as possible.
After you've come up with a topic you want to write on, you can do one or more of your methods of invention AGAIN, to come up with more ideas that can be used as supporting details to develop your essay. So inveniton can be used in two ways - to narrow your topic and find a thesis, and then to develop that topic into a whole essay by finding examples and details for support.
The following "methods of invention" will assist you in those tasks.
Brainstorming:
Brainstorming is also called "listing." Essentially you just write down whatever ideas come into your head as fast as you can. Each idea leads to another idea, and you write all of these ideas as words or phrases in list form. Like other methods of invention, brainstorming is using that right side of the brain, the playful, creative side, and turning "off" the left side, that is, the brain's editor. So you don't worry about spelling or if the idea is "good" or not. Some of the ideas that come into your head may seem irrelevant or useless or silly or otherwise "bad" - but you don't cross them off the list, you write them all down. That "bad" idea will lead you to other ideas if you let it flow through - other ideas that may actually be very pertinent and helpful to your essay.
Here are some examples of brainstorming:
Sample brainstorming for an essay on the environment and Sample brainstorming of an essay on pets.
Clustering:
Clustering, also called "mapping" or "bubbling," is a graphic, and slightly more organized, way of brainstorming. You make circles, or bubbles, on your paper with stems coming off of them leading to more bubbles related to the first bubble. Stems also come off the secondary bubbles, leading to tertiary bubbles related to their connected bubbles. Start with a circle in the middle of your paper, and then write your topic (such as "pollution") in the middle of that circle. The circles coming off of that middle circle might be "land," "air," and "water." Circles would then come off of each of those circles, relating to each topic - and so on. See Example of Clustering.
You might prefer clustering if you are a more visual learner, or if you like to organize your ideas as you go. You can also take your brainstorming and "cluster" it after you've finished, and this could generate even more ideas.
Freewriting:
Freewriting is like brainstorming, except you are writing in paragraph form rather than list form.
When you freewrite, instead of staring at a blank piece of paper (or computer screen) for hours, you just put your pen to the paper (or hands to the keyboard) and go ahead and write. "Writer's block" occurs because you are editing what you are writing before you have written it. You think for a while, write down a sentence, and then decide it's not good and cross it out. Then a little while later you come up with something else - write it down - then erase that, too. With freewriting, you put that editor on hold and give the ideas in your head a chance to come out, for good or bad.
With freewriting, you are writing in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The only rule for freewriting is that you can't stop writing. No matter what, you don't stop. You don't worry about grammar, punctuation, or spelling. You don't worry about whether what you are writing is good or bad, usable or unusable, or even related to the end topic you want to pursue. In fact, you may go off topic many times. The only thing you have to do is just keep writing. If you get stuck and can't think of anything to write about - then what do you do? You write whatever is in your head (the point is to get the ideas in your head on paper), so you'd write something like, "I can't think of anything to write about."
See Example of Freewriting.
Looping:
Looping is taking one part of what you wrote using one of your methods of invention, and then doing a method of invention again. For example, maybe there was one particular part of your freewriting that you liked and wanted to explore and develop further. You would freewrite again on that section of your first freewriting. Or, you may come up with an idea in your brainstorming list, and then you might want to do a freewriting on that idea.
Heuristics (or Asking Questions):
Heuristics is a pattern you apply to something; in invention, it means a pattern of questions about the topic. The most famous set of questions are the "journalist's questions," or the questions a
journalist must answer in his or her news story. These are:
Who,
What,
When,
Where,
Why, and
How.
When using these questions, you would ask each of these questions about your topic, repeating the question with a different angle several times. See Example of Asking Questions.
Another, less well-known heuristic is Twenty Questions for the Writer outlined in Jacqueline Berke's book by the same name. She explores each question in-depth, devoting a chapter to each. Her questions are:
The questions you can ask about a topic
1. What Does X mean?
2. How can X be described?
3. What are the component parts of X?
4. How is X made or done?
5. How should X made or done?
6. What is the essential function of X?
7. What are the causes of X?
8. What are the consequences of X?
9. What are the types of X?
10. How does X compare with Y?
11. What is the present status of X?
12. How can X be interpreted?
13. What are the facts about X?
14. How did X happen?
15. What kind of person is X?
16. What is my personal response to X?
17. What is my memory of X?
18. What is the value of X?
19. How can X be summarized?
20. What case can be made for or against X?
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Possible kind of essay
Definition
Description
Simple Analysis
Process Analysis
Directional Analysis
Functional Analysis
Causal Analysis
Causal Analysis
Classification
Comparison
Comparison
Interpretation
Reportage
Narration
Characterization
Reflection
Reminiscence
Evaluation
Summary
Argumentation
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Dialogue:
Dialogue is discussing your topic with another person to come up with ideas to write about. If you are an extrovert, you might like this way of generating ideas. Ask a friend, roommate, spouse, or someone else you can talk to to discuss the topic with you. Tell them you need to think of something to write about for your essay, and just start talking with them and exploring the various possible aspects of your topic. You might ask them to ask you questions about the topic too.
Journals:
Journals are a wonderful tool for writers. Not only does the practice of journaling, especially daily journaling, improve writing skills, but they provide a fertile ground for ideas for future essays or other writings. Professional writers use journals in their work. If an author sees a beautiful sunset and describes it in his journal that day, it will be fresh in his mind and the details will be much more vivid than if he wrote it down weeks or months later. Then, when he needs a sunset for his novel, he can refer to his journal and use that entry. The advantage to using journal writing is it usually is close to the event being described and so is more detailed and accurate. For example, if you had to descibe your high school prom the day after the prom, or describe it thirty years later, which one of your descriptions would be more full and developed and detailed? Which would be more "real" and alive?
Memories and Experiences:
One of the first rules of writing is to "write what you know" because you can be more detailed and specific and develop your essay more, making it more interesting and convincing. So when you have a broad and general topic that you must narrow down, ask yourself what your memories and experiences of that topic are. If your topic is sports, it makes sense to write about a sport you were active in, that you know a lot about (because then you actually ahve something to say!). You might also describe an experience you had in a sport. Or, if your topic is pets, you might have learned something about pets from your experience with them. (For example, maybe you saw a friend of yours who was lonely get a dog, and then he cheered up. From that, you may have learned the positive psychological impact of pets on people who live alone, and you might want to write an essay on this topic.)
Observations:
Look at the world around you. It is full of topics for writing. If you are given a topic, such as pets, go to the park and observe people with their pets - what do you notice? What do you see, hear, smell, taste, feel? What do you think about these perceptions? Or go to the humane society or a vet and observe them in action. Or if your topic is sports, go to a ball game and observe the sights and sounds and smells around you. Chances are, in the midst of all these observations, a topic will occur to you that you'd like to write about.
Research:
Research can be as informal as perusing the daily paper or even weekly/monthly magazines or journals on your topic, just to gather ideas for writing.
If you are writing a research paper (as you will do for Advanced Composition, English 135), your research will be more formal. See
Research Sources and following for more information.
See the sections on pre-writing and invention in your textbook for more information on and examples of methods of invention.
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