Preterition

My research vault, the on-disk assembly of folders, plaintext templated notes, and automated scripts that powers my scholarship and this weblog, is built on Niklas Luhmann’s slip-box model. Personal knowledge management (PKM) packages have coupled with task management strategies like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) to become a massive, hugely profitable industry, with one of its founding texts being the adaptation of Luhmann’s slip-box into the system Sönke Ahrens promotes in How to Take Smart Notes: one idea per note, every note with a permanent address, every note linked to other notes, nothing thrown away. The method Ahrens offers is to slice the work of reading and thinking into portions thin enough to manage and give each slice an address: a technique for externalizing memory.

I organize my own work that way. Recently, I revisited Ahrens’s book and was struck by a charge he makes in passing. Almost every guide on writing recommends starting with brainstorming, Ahrens says, and he thinks that’s backward: the ideas you pull out of your head in a brainstorm don’t originate with you in that moment, but from past ideas you’ve read and thought, so the sensible move is to stop brainstorming for a topic and look in the slip-box instead (Ahrens 2017, sec. 7). He cites Luhmann for the book’s concluding words: “I never encounter any mental blockages” (sec. 13). That should draw any compositionist’s attention. Rhetoric and composition, following thousands of years of tradition, calls the part of writing where the ideas come from invention, not memory—though invention’s topoi were originally places, and finding an argument meant walking back through them. We have a literature on it. We have journals. So when a bestselling book about writing says writing guides have been getting invention wrong, I went looking for our reply.

There isn’t one.

An unanswered charge

Ahrens is German, writing from the European tradition of writing instruction, and the American body of scholarship is largely invisible to his perspective: he cites not a single source from composition. He never uses invention in the rhetorical sense and uses rhetoric once and incidentally. Despite his system’s parallels to historical practice, he doesn’t mention the commonplace book, Erasmus, or the tradition from De Copia at all (sadly, former commenter the Happy Tutor seems to have retired to an emeritus role). Ahrens attacks the topic-first study guide that tells students to choose a topic, brainstorm, outline, draft. He names handouts from the Australian National University and the University of Wisconsin. The genre of the guide slices the work into pieces; it discretizes into steps over time, in a line, toward the telos of a completed, delivered paper.

The quarrel Ahrens sees isn’t over whether to slice writing into manageable pieces but over the shape of the cut: linear and terminal on the guide’s side, addressed and accumulating on the slip-box’s. On group brainstorming Ahrens cites a 1991 meta-analysis from social psychology concluding that groups come up with fewer good ideas and narrow the range of topics they cover, but concedes in a note that “you can avoid the problem by letting everyone brainstorm alone and compiling the results afterward” (sec. 13.1 and its note 38)—which is, as it happens, the nominal group Diehl and Stroebe tested. The one review of the book in a writing-research journal, Melanie Schiller’s (2017), ignores invention and composition to focus its critique on the economics: Schiller notes Ahrens never asks why the neoliberal university generates the demand for his project.

Composition rejected the topic-first study guide’s model long ago: Ann Berthoff, in College English in 1984, argues that assigning topics “is no substitute for instruction” (Berthoff 2003, 341). She argues, familiarly and compellingly, that writing is thinking and composing is meaning-making, and that a template (which is to say: a technology, a device, an artifact) can’t make meaning for you. So the charge was answerable, and the answer was forty years old when Ahrens wrote. It just happens to agree with him. The field had thrown out the topic-first guide before he got there, and by the time he did, it had also thrown out the procedures it might have offered in the guide’s place. Composition kept the word and dropped the procedure.

Ahrens sells the procedure without the word; without invention, heuristics, or prewriting. The word invention, of course, is doing fine. The most-cited essay in the field’s indexed record is David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” which I recently cited for scale. Invention in Bartholomae’s essay is something a student does to an entire discourse, not something done in undertaking the ideation of composing; not in the discrete act of bringing writing into being. Bartholomae’s essay first appeared in Mike Rose’s When a Writer Can’t Write (1985), a collection of studies of blocked writers whose index runs to behavioral correlates, dispositions, and indicators. One of that book’s longest chapters comes from Robert Boice on psychotherapies for writing blocks. Chris Gallagher observes that the book might have been read as an integration of social, cognitive, and behavioral accounts of writing, but “is best remembered today for including David Bartholomae’s ‘Inventing the University’” (Gallagher 2016, 253), and, I would add, certainly not for Boice’s behaviorism.

Word kept, procedure dropped

So I used the citation asymmetry tool to inquire further about invention. The same caveats apply as before: the tool sees nine indexed journals, which leaves out Kairos, Enculturation, and Composition Studies and catches only a hundred-odd records of Writing Program Administration; OpenAlex carries some records twice, so its raw counts used here run slightly high; and pre-2000 records mostly lack abstracts, so it’s largely counting titles only in those decades.

The word invention runs 26 hits in the 1970s, 69 in the 1980s, 24 in the 1990s, then 30, 37, and 23 in the decades since: a crash and a partial recovery. The caveat about abstracts cuts one way here: the 1980s peak counted on titles alone, and the decades since had abstracts to match, so the peak is understated and the recovery flattered. Even so, the recovery happens in a different vocabulary and a different place. The phrase rhetorical invention runs at a handful a decade through the 1970s and 1980s, drops to 1 in the 1990s, then climbs: 5, 13, and already 8 in the 2020s. The procedural words empty out. Prewriting runs 2, 5, 17, and 6 from the 1960s through the 1990s, and then stops dead in 1998; it doesn’t come back once there are abstracts to find it in. Heuristics runs 8, 16, 7, 3, 3, and 4 from the 1970s on. Brainstorming never exceeds three in any decade across the entire record. And of the twenty-three hits for invention in the 2020s, eighteen are in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Rhetoric Review, three in CCC, and two in Written Communication. Their subjects are olfactory rhetoric in the Long Kesh prison protest, climate rhetoric, colonial cartography, the Frankenstein myth, aporia in Obama’s Dallas memorial speech. Invention became a theoretical category for reading public and cultural rhetoric, not a thing a writer does with a draft. The theory journals absorbed the word while the pedagogy and research journals stopped naming the practice.

Look at what the word does in one of those hits. Kate Siegfried’s brilliant article on the no-wash protest in Long Kesh prison, in Rhetoric Society Quarterly this year, reads the prisoners’ protest as olfactory rhetoric: an act under total institutional constraint, revealing in its reflection the institution that imposed the constraint (Siegfried 2026). Siegfried offers a rigorous and pointed symptomatic reading in Louis Althusser’s sense, and Fredric Jameson’s after him. The act is a symptom, the reading is a diagnosis, and invention is the name for what the reading finds. In Siegfried’s and similar readings, invention leaves the writer’s work for the scene of the act. Its purpose becomes diagnosis, its method becomes literary-critical, and the student departs the scene, replaced by the scholar’s critique. These readings treat the protest as the genesis of rhetoric rather than its breakdown, and I see that version of invention as a category of emergence, not of practice: something a critic reads, not something a writer does.

Chris Gallagher offers the cleanest name for the slip, describing how the field’s attention moves “from writing-the-verb to writing-the-noun” (239), from what writers do to what texts are. It’s Donald Murray’s governing axiom run backward, from process to product (Murray 1972). I made a parallel to Gallagher’s observation in Spokane two years ago, in a talk about the field’s reading of generative AI: that we’d taken to teaching the contexts of writing rather than the activity of it. The numbers say the move is older than the machines.

The numbers don’t show the field lost an argument about heuristics. They show that the field changed the subject just as the evidence arrived. The social turn is the usual explanation for why attention left the individual writer, and it’s a real one, but it doesn’t explain why the procedures went along with the writer rather than being made social. Part of the answer is older: the field had long suspected that what psychologists measure is whatever is easiest to measure (Berthoff 1971, 238), and a procedure you can count looked like one more instrument for counting students. In 1987 Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that seemed to settle the group portion of the brainstorming question in social psychology (Diehl and Stroebe 1987). Nominal groups—people brainstorming alone, their ideas pooled afterward—had outproduced interacting groups in eighteen of twenty-two earlier studies (497). Their experiments pinned most of the time lost on production blocking, or a fancy name for waiting your turn to talk (505–507); found that expecting to be evaluated lowered individuals’ output on its own (502–504); and ended with concrete advice: let people develop and write down their ideas alone before any group evaluates them (508).

Notice how they counted. A research assistant transcribed each session and was told to write “each separate idea on a separate card” (500). They could measure invention only by slicing it into cards, which is to say that a meter for invention exists, and its unit is a slip of paper. The scope matters. They counted ideas under brainstorming rules, and never measured anybody’s actual writing. The finding indicts group brainstorming, which Ahrens attacks, and favors the solitary procedures already familiar to composition: freewriting, the notebook, writing as knowledge-producing self-oriented discourse. (Peter Elbow judiciously avoids the word brainstorming in his discussion of freewriting, even in the revised second edition of Writing Without Teachers.) The paper has about nineteen hundred citations in OpenAlex. None of them is in our nine core journals or in the eight adjacent ones.

The evidence also came from inside the house. In 1993 Ronald Kellogg, an experimental psychologist, published a long essay in Composition Studies (Kellogg 1993) observing that “the prewriting strategy of outlining has been in and out of favor with composition instructors over the decades” (19). Before a responsible compositionist reaches out to whack me on the nose with a rolled-up five-paragraph theme (or the Schaffer paragraph and the rest of the dead objects), lemme point out something here: Kellogg’s outline is not the template a student is handed and graded against. It’s the writer’s own hierarchical plan, made before drafting, and Kellogg’s case for it is about attention and retrieval, not form.

Planning ahead, Kellogg argues, frees the writer to concentrate on turning ideas into language, and a hierarchy organizes what the writer knows so it can be found when it’s needed (19). College students wrote single-session essays in his lab (15). The writers who outlined—I know, this feels uncomfortable—produced better essays; a linear list of ideas fell between; and clustering, which he notes Gabriele Rico had advocated as “a brain storming technique,” didn’t help at all (19–21). Kellogg presented three ways of slicing a plan into pieces, and the one that helped was the one that nested them.

That result seems like it should worry a slip-box writer, because a box of linked notes resembles a cluster more than an outline. But Luhmann addresses concerns about branching. A comment on note 22 goes in directly behind it, as 22a if 23 is taken, and by alternating numbers and letters, with slashes between, the addresses grow to things like 21/3d7a7 (Ahrens 2017, sec. 1.3). The box grows a tree inside its network, and every note has a place in a hierarchy before it has a link. Kellogg charged process research with neglecting the variables that affect writing skill (14), and he refused, twice, to set cognitive models against social ones (3, 9). I can’t claim the field ignored him, because I can’t measure that: Composition Studies is one of the journals the tool’s index can’t see. What I can say is that in 1993, in the middle of the social turn, an experimental psychologist published results about outlining and clustering as forms of invention in a composition journal, in the vocabulary the field was constructing.

Discarding the unit with the verdict

The outline is the clearest case of what the field dropped, and it’s worth being precise about why it was dropped. Compositionists correctly argue that the five-paragraph theme is an awful unit for an essay: it cuts knowledge formation into a predetermined shape of about a thousand words, an introduction with a thesis statement, three paragraphs of evidence, and a conclusion that restates the thesis and says what you’ve shown. That’s a grading instrument and a teaching checklist, and it became a genre to be pilloried. Richard Braddock is the field’s witness against its prime directive, the topic sentence. His 1974 study, which provided the basis behind CCCC’s annual Braddock Award, found that only 13 percent of the expository paragraphs written by professional writers begin with a topic sentence, that 3 percent end with one, and that fewer than half have an explicit topic sentence anywhere, so “students should not be told that professional writers usually begin their paragraphs with topic sentences” (Braddock 2003, 202). The template deserves the burial Braddock’s finding delivers.

Look at how he got there, though: his test for whether a paragraph has a topic sentence is “the test offered when one constructs a sentence outline of the major points of an essay” (193). Braddock outlined every one of his twenty-five essays by hand, slicing each into topic-sentence units so they could be counted, and his count returned 13 percent. The field’s founding case against the template was made with the outline as a reader’s instrument, and the instrument went out with the verdict. The field, handed a unit built for grading, refused discretization into units as such, and lost the writer’s units along with the grader’s. Meanwhile the enthymeme stayed in invention, because it’s Aristotle’s and therefore belongs to logic, and whatever looked like it came from Peter Ramus went out, because it looked like a tool. Genre theory took organization the way rhetorical theory took invention: the words stayed, the procedures went. Anis Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of the Writer (2003) took invention too, relocating it from the writer to the genre. Ramus, of course, is the scholar known for moving invention and arrangement out of rhetoric and into dialectic. The field’s anti-Ramist move follows a Ramist precedent.

The template’s numbers are ceilings: five paragraphs, one thesis, a thousand words, and a ceiling is read at a glance, which is exactly what makes it a grading instrument. The slip-box’s numbers are inventory: about ninety thousand notes in Luhmann’s, by Ahrens’s count (sec. 11), and inventory is read only by taking stock. One is a unit of delivery and the other a unit of accumulation. The template’s structure consumes the work, rubric-like, and prepares it for terminal handoff; the box’s structure is where the work starts as a body of knowledge rather than a discrete instance, closer to a memory palace. The field, refusing the first, has scant vocabulary left in which to seek the second.

Legible to whom

Slicing the work into bits is a legibility strategy, in the sense James C. Scott gave the word for what states do to forests and villages to make them countable and taxable. It raises the question: legible to whom, and toward what? The slip-box’s bits are addressed so the writer can find them again and arrange them into composing sequences. The template’s bits are counted so that a teacher can read a stack of them on a Sunday. Composition, facing the second, refused the first along with it, and with the unit went the meter. Victor Villanueva captures the affect exactly: “we humanities types tend to fear numbers” (Villanueva 2005, 58). The word invention survived because a category needn’t be counted. One can read the invention of a public rhetoric without a unit in sight.

References

Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Smart Notes.

Berthoff, Ann E. 1971. “The Problem of Problem Solving.” College Composition and Communication 22 (3): 237–42.

Berthoff, Ann E. (1984) 2003. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 329–43. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. First published in College English 46 (8) (1984): 743–55.

Braddock, Richard. (1974) 2003. “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 189–204. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. First published in Research in the Teaching of English 8 (3) (1974): 287–302.

Diehl, Michael, and Wolfgang Stroebe. 1987. “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (3): 497–509.

Gallagher, Chris W. 2016. “What Writers Do: Behaviors, Behaviorism, and Writing Studies.” College Composition and Communication 68 (2): 238–65.

Kellogg, Ronald T. 1993. “Observations on the Psychology of Thinking and Writing.” Composition Studies 21 (1): 3–41.

Murray, Donald. 1972. “Teach Writing as Process Not Product.” The Leaflet (November): 11–17.

Schiller, Melanie. 2017. “Book Review: Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.” Journal of Writing Research 9 (2): 227–31.

Siegfried, Kate. 2026. “The No Wash Protest in Long Kesh Prison: Hygiene Panic, Olfactory Rhetorics, and Infrastructural Ruination in Occupied Ireland.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 56 (4): 1–15.

Villanueva, Victor. 2005. “Toward a Political Economy of Rhetoric.” In Radical Relevance: Toward a Scholarship of the Whole Left, edited by Laura Gray-Rosendale and Steven Rosendale, 57–66. Albany: SUNY.