HEURISTICS -- THE DRAFTER'S FRIEND

Writers don't always think about drafting as a process of inventing arguments, but that is precisely how the Greeks thought about it when they first began theorizing rhetoric. That is, arguments aren't just there, waiting for writers to pick them up and write them down.

Instead, based on the particular rhetorical situation--the intersection of audience, writer, topic, and whatever pressure causes the writer to feel the need to speak now--writers need to invent arguments appropriate to the occasion. The arguments that will work in one rhetorical situation are unlikely to work in another (they might, but there's no guarantee, and every situation has to be analyzed as if it were completely new).

One of the questions the ancients pre-occupied themselves with, then, was how to go about invention. Today, the question we ask ourselves is a humble one: how should we go about discovering what we want to say and then getting a draft down on paper?

For many students, the answer is simple: sit down the night before the paper is due and grind it out. Not only does that method leave students with little more than a first draft, it is also almost always exceedingly stressful. For some students it actually paralyzes them.

But there is a less stressful, and more productive, way to go about it, and that is through the use of heuristics. Heuristics are strategies of invention, or ways to "discover" content and get it down on paper so that when you are ready to draft, you already have everything you need.

Sharon Crowley's and Debbie Hawhee's discussion of copia/copiousness in Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students is useful here.The ancients believed in copiousness, i.e., "many arguments, many understandings" (32) That is, in order to make good arguments--to write well--writers need to write a lot. Much more than they will actually use in the end.

Crowley and Hawhee write: "Copia can be loosely translated from Latin to mean an abundant and ready supply of language--something appropriate to say or write whenever the occasion arises. Ancient teaching about rhetoric is everywhere infused with the notions of expansiveness, amplification, abundance" (32).

This is in strong contrast to the way students are taught to write final drafts today--economically, briefly--and so students get the idea that all their writing should be tight and brief. This, unfortunately, completely denies students the one truly significant advantage that copiousness gives them--the chance to write themselves into really smart arguments: stingy drafting makes for weaker arguments.

One way to think about heuristics is that they are the questions your paper needs to answer. Student are so used to thinking that a thesis sentence is the guiding force behind paper development that they do not realize that what drives good rhetoric is that it answers questions people have about the topic.

If your paper does not answer questions people have, they will read no further than it takes for them to figure that out.

The ancients said that there are four basic kinds of questions (they called them stases):

• Does something exist or did it take place?
• What is it (how should we define it)?
• Is it good or bad?
• What should we do about it?

They believed that if we could answer such questions, we would know most of what we need to make good decisions about how to argue responsibly and, ultimately, where to stand on any given issue.

Using stasis theory, we can construct a set of questions for contemporary needs that will give us an equally complete picture of an issue. Then, by methodically answering the questions in as much detail as possible, we can develop the materials we need for drafting.

For your papers, you will do research, but you should note that responding to heuristics does not mean that you only write what your research tells you. You should write everything you know, have heard, have been told, have heard a rumor about, has been commented, has been suggested, etc.

It is unimportant at the heuristics stage whether or not what you know is actually true or is something you believe or, indeed, goes off on a tangent. In fact, things that veer off in the "wrong" direction can often turn out to be just the thing you need to make an argument interesting or to take you where the paper needs to go.

The point is to write everything you possibly can. The more the better. Crowley has said that for her heuristics are `a means of taking more copious and better notes than you normally would on your own.’

You will have time later to sort it out and make sense of it.