Corbett - topoi

 hueristics for invention
topoi - line of argument
44
It has been only since the shift of interest from the finished
product to the generating process that many teachers of composition
have developed a curiosity about how their students go about
writing the papers that they are assigned to write.

research - Janet Emig/ Linda Flower
psychologists/ sociologists

Aristotle - topoi

46
forms of arguments
47
The Latin rhetoricians picked up on the notion of the topics
and, as we have been shown by scholars like Elbert W. Harrington
and Michael C. Leff, put their own distinctive stamp on the
topics.2 They preserved the notion that the topics were places that
one consulted to find suitable arguments by using the Latin word
loci as the equivalent of the Greek word topoi. That metaphor of
places is preserved in some of the other images that rhetoricians
like Cicero and Quintilian used when referring to the topics: "seats
(sedes)," "regions," "veins or mines," "storehouses or thesauri."

48
topical systems
Although the Latin rhetoricians appropriated the Greek cuc:i1rt:>"n'"m
of the topics and impressed it with their own stamp, they
advanced the discipline of the topics. Both Cicero and ""'u.u . .ttu.u;,,.u
advocated a reliance on the fruits of a liberal education more than
on the mechanism of a topical system.
49
Middle Ages
Topics - guiding principles vs.  devices for principles
common themes for conventions
became stale
50
Locke - empiricism
 There was a widespread revolt, especially in the eight~
eenth century, against the epistemology practiced by the so-called
scholastic philosophers, and the syllogism became the symbol
the mode of thinking that the Age of Reason was rejecting.
The Grecian sophists were the first inventors of this artificial system
of oratory; and they showed a prodigious subtlety and fertility in the
contrivance of these loci. Succeeding rhetoricians, dazzled by the plan,
wrought them up into so regular a system that one would think they
meant to teach how a person might mechanically become an orator
without any genius at all. They gave him recipes for making speeches on
all manner of subjects.
51
Blair's depreciation of the topics could stand as an articulation of
the reasons many teachers today have declined to use this heuristic
system in the composition classroom. In their view, the topics
are unduly complicated, stifle creativity, and produce dull, trivial
discourse.
52
renewed interest 1960s

Pike/ Young - retrieval of what is known, analysis of problematic data, discovery of ordering principles

Topics
m
56
shaping data
modern topoi - Dudley Bailey
57
inferential reasoning - the computer (won't work if you don't put in the "proper" commands)
limitations of the computer
"Until computers can be programmed to make that kind of
discrimination, they may continue to work faster and more indefatigably
than people do, but they will not be "smarter" than
people are. I suspect that computers will not acquire that kind of
"smarts" until they develop a "topical sense." Then, and only
then, will the computer become a "rhetorician," and then, and
oniy then, will the computer become the generator of relevant
ideas and arguments and proofs that the topoi have been for
generations of speakers and writers."