From the Carrot's Point of View

I appreciated the philosophy behind Theresa Enos' Invention Activity in the reading for this week, but I had some hesitations about the activity itself. I liked that she saw invention activities as something that students should be able to use in other writing situations, and that she believed that invention activities should take the writer in several directions.

But when I read her actual invention activity (choose an object, write something about it from different rhetorical perspectives) I found the same problem with it that I have found with several of the lesson plans that we've had in class. They're cute, they're fun, and the students would likely be engaged by them -- they're just not relevant enough to the ultimate goal of writing a paper. For example, if a student who did Enos' activity was asked after class to summarize what happened in class, I could virtually guarantee you she would say, "I wrote like a carrot" instead of "I learned the aim of different kinds of discourse and the rhetorical choices reflected by voice" (236). And I kind of feel like the student who says this probably "learned" what she was supposed to learn, but if she can't clearly articulate or remember it, what does it matter?

My point here is that our invention activities must lead to something. It is not enough that they teach principles, lessons, or maxims in writing, because if they don't actually lead directly into an assignment, I think they end up feeling like busy work! This is why I liked David Sudol's "Model of Invention" better. The students did lots of "fun" freewriting, but it led them into the paper they had to write.