Invention, continued. I spent some time today looking over the work by my newish bloggers. They are about a month in, and there are lots of good posts and perhaps two main problems that have yet to resolve themselves. The first is that some entries don't seem to show much awareness of what a reader might really need or want from a post on the topic. So, a sense of audience.

The second is that several students are struggling, that is, failing to write regularly. This is a very human failing, as I an attest. Let's assume it's not laziness or being overworked, though it could be. Let's guess that people don't immediately see the virtue of writing short entries of a certain kind -- they don't "get" the genre right away, maybe. And probably beneath the surface is that they don't see yet how bloggers invent new material every day by responding to things they read. So, a knowledge of invention*.

Take the two together: if you don't trade ideas with your fellow citizens regularly, no wonder you might not have a good idea how to speak with them adequately; if you don't "get" the basic genres of democratic exchange, then you won't use them; you'll never figure out how to fill them with good content. You'll grown into a long adulthood of silence or failed public speech.

The snake is eating its own tail here. We need to teach invention as a citizenship skill.

*"'Invention' (inventio, heuresis) means 'discovery'. In rhetoric it designates the discovery of the resources for discursive persuasion latent in any given rhetorical problem." (unsigned source) [0 & P]