Paper Four - Brainstorm and That Brainstorming

Davis Olson

Stoner

FSTY 1313

13 December 2012

Paper Four

        At the beginning of Rhetoric and Composition two, my fellow peer’s and I were told that there’s more than one way to brainstorm and that brainstorming is actually quite vague. Hearing this concept from my first college writing professor was fantastic, after all, I absolutely despised creating word webs in middle school and high school. Despite my illation, finding out that brainstorming doesn’t require a table of any kind was nerve racking for the reason that my peer’s and I were only taught one way to write. Going into further detail, our class was then introduced to the Five Cannons of Rhetoric. The first of these cannons, invention, included the concept of brainstorming not requiring a set order. After going into invention deeper my nerves were calmed and my curiosity was intrigued. I wanted to learn more about the other cannons of arrangement, style, memory, and delivery and how they could help improve my writing.

With invention, which is the first of the rhetorical cannon’s, it was taught that there were special topics called Topoi. These topoi comprised of definition, followed by division, comparison, relationship, circumstance, and lastly testimony.  Through these topoi, we were supposed to be able to conceive what content a paper consisted of. To me, it seemed that the cannon of invention was just a fancy way of saying brainstorming. Despite this though, following this method seemed to work because I began receiving grades higher than I’ve ever gotten on papers. The cannon of invention improved my writing already, so moving on to the next cannon of arrangement gnawed at my interest.

Arrangement was the second cannon, though it wasn’t introduced like invention was. This probably had to do with the fact that arrangement involves the order of one’s paper, not the actual content. With that said, there are five ways of arranging. The first of these ways is chronological order, which is that the content is written in order of occurrence. The second way of arrangement is in order of rank or importance. Following order of rank, the order of repetition is one that consisted of a subject and its adjuncts or parts. After order of rank, the order of classical arrangement is one that was invented by a man named Marcus Tullius Cicero. Concerning Cicero’s arrangement, it entails an introduction, statement of facts, a division of the facts, some sort of proof, the refutation, and then a conclusion. Lastly, the fifth way of arrangement is that of logical order, which is similar to Cicero’s method, though it is shorter. A logical order is one that consists of a premise, a certain number of propositions, the warrants of the propositions, all followed by a conclusion. After learning all these ways I was able to arrange my papers, the only trouble I had left was deciding which order. The last three cannons of rhetoric after invention and arrangement were style, memory, and delivery. These three cannons consisted of the writer’s way of constructing sentences that conveyed not only how the reader interpreted a writer’s work, but also that the writer’s work is indeed written by that specific writer.