Modern use of theprogymnasmatain teaching rhetorical invention

Abstract

ly to students, but create an impression for some that the techniques are purely activities for fun, trivial interludes that don't contribute substantially to a finished paper. In addition, some teachers fear the freedom these techniques allow students and believe more controlled instruction is needed. On the other hand, structured heuristics such as Burke's Pentad and Young, Becker, and Pike's Tagmemic Grid provide systems to guide inquiry, but often are so abstract, acontextual and complex that they are difficult for students to apply and sometimes seem to intrude on rather than to aid the composing process. I Aware of problems with both approaches and having little time to present them fully, a majority of us, I would guess, take the middle road and briefly introduce students to invention techniques before quickly moving on to other concerns.2 Problems in reconciling free and structured heuristics have appeared in several articles.3 In the end, a number of theorists say that structure and freedom, reason and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness aren't mutually exclusive: Each school of heuristics contains elements of the other. For example, free writing theorists Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow advocate that after students use automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing, they should consciously seek patterns in their free writing-or in Elbow's words, an emerging center of gravity (20), which can then be used to generate and organize more discourse. And structuralist Richard Young points out the guiding, not dictating nature of heuristics. Young emphasizes that systematic heuristics do not always work consciously: Although more or less systematic, a heuristic search is not wholly conscious or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are also necessary. A heuristic is an explicit strategy for effective guessing ( 135). Since the two approaches contain aspects of each other, there should be pedagogies that integrate both heuristics. But how? I believe a way of addressing the problem of how teachers can integrate free and structured inquiry effectively can be found in the classical progymnasmata, exercises designed to train the classical student in the art of inventio. While the classical tradition may suggest a rhetoric that is unduly prescriptive to some