So when we get back together after the holiday, I want to talk with students about invention, which they will know from other contexts but not from the field of rhetoric. But all writers need strategies for creating ideas for their writing, and bloggers have some good starting points.
*personal experience
*responding to another writer
*linking and discussing (a variation)
*testing another writer's ideas against personal experience (a variation)
*testing one writer's ideas against another writer's ideas or experience, etc.
And in general, the practice of writing each day seems to act as an aid to invention. If we write 20 or 30 times a month, we will have thoughts that would not have materialized without the blogger's writerly habits of mind.
So maybe here's my point: blogging is not democratic only because it gives each person a place to publish -- it is also democratic because it is a body of practices that help each person invent something worth reading. It is as if freedom of speech is not valuable only or even mainly for its freedom, but rather it is valuable for the social practices that it helps a society cultivate, for the internal and social work it helps individuals do, and for the quality of the speech that results from those things. Not to mention the quality of listening.
Given the nature of political speech in this country, we need to work not just on invention but on our critical listening skills. (I'm thinking of you, Zell Miller.)