St. Martin's chapter 6

Justine Mack

In St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing chapter 6 Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldthwaite discuss teaching invention in writing. I do believe using invention strategies is very effective in the process of writing, however I rarely ever use them. I usually just begin to write and after I have a completed rough, rough, rough draft I go back and edit and add or eliminate thoughts, ideas, or sentences. Glenn and Goldthwaite discuss two types of inventions heuristic and classical topical invention. Heuristic strategies should have transcendency, flexible order, and generative capacity. The goal as a teacher teaching heuristic strategies is that the students continue to use them, as they become second nature on every writing assignment. Classical topical invention strategies focus on topics that can be used to create a thesis and invent subject matters and arguments. The four topics that are most useful to students are definition, analogy, consequence, and testimony.

One invention strategy mentioned is journal writing, which I am a big fan of. I have rarely ever been asked to complete a journal for class maybe once or twice in elementary school and once in college but I have always kept my own personal journal. My mother bought me a journal at a young age to do exactly what the authors suggest a journal should be used for, “a journal is a record of a mind and its thoughts, rather than a record of body and its movements.” However, I have been asked to keep a blog for several different courses in college. I think the idea of a blog is pretty cool cause it’s almost like an electronic notebook because you can always refer back to your blog online in place of taking notes in a notebook. Brainstorming and clustering are two more invention strategies suggested in this chapter. Both these strategies are meant to be timed and messy in order for the writer to spill out all their thoughts out on the page, leaving no time to edit. Brainstorming is the most popular invention strategy and one I have used many times. The final invention strategy mentioned is free writing. Free writing can happen after brainstorming or clustering taking out the most important thoughts or ideas and writing about them. Again free writing is timed and you can’t stop even if you can’t think of anything to write you should be instructed to write exactly that, “I can’t think of anything to write.” The purpose of free writing is to concentrate on writing and to take no time to worry about what others might think of it.

Like I mentioned earlier I do believe invention strategies are extremely useful. For my own writing assignment I do plan on using invention strategies in my scaffolding plan. I really enjoy either brainstorming or clustering than using that to free write because you can then feed off several ideas and begin to write and while writing maybe spark new ideas.