Heuristics in the English Classroom: Working the Problem of Drafting the Research Paper

Of the vexed issues confronting teachers of the first-year writing sequence, none is more frustrating than that of getting students to write in the drafting stages. And not just "to" write, but to write the right thing. The solution that the Composition literature offers to the problem of fluency and content development is process. That is, the general consensus is that writing is a five-stage process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing. Rhetoric offers an alternative to Composition's process approach in the form of invention. As a rhetorician who has found classical rhetoric a particularly useful means of teaching writing, Crowley has long used "heuristics," a system of investigation, and what she calls a "means of discovery," as a strategy for creating writing assignments that students could more successfully complete in the drafting stages. The system of "heuristics" is explored in this article.