Can I say knowledge construction equates with rhetorical invention which equates to using weblogs to socially construct knowledge in academic learning communities?

Writing as Situated Thinking in General Education

Yvonne Merrill, University of Arizona:

Analysis, for example, was seen as a catch-all word for anything beyond recall, including not only categorization and description, but interpretation, synthesis and application as well. We arrived at invention as an inclusive term for the kinds of creative responses required across different disciplines, from solving new mathematical or physical problems to unusual and innovative interpretations, syntheses and applications of abstract concepts or principles. — accessed 10/31/2004 — (my bolding)

In Reading as Rhetorical Invention, Doug Brent says:

The challenge of a rhetoric of reading, in short, is to discover the mechanisms of interpretation, evaluation and synthesis by which each indiviual creates for herself a structure of beliefs that is unique to her, influenced by but not under the control of the texts on which it is erected. (15) — my italics and bolding

How is invention different than rhetorical invention? If I understand her, I think Karen Burke LeFevre would say that rhetorical invention is tied to the situation, but invention generally means an inquiry process.

If rhetorical reading can be defined as when we “interpret, evaluate, and synthesize knowledge”, can rhetorical invention be defined the same way? According to the question that I started out with, then that would mean that knowledge construction would also have to be defined as when we “interpret, evaluate and synthesize knowledge,” but that puts the word knowledge in the definition, which is not a good thing. How about… knowledge construction can be defined as when we “interpret, evaluate, and synthesize texts (defining texts liberally here)?” But, then, why not have just one word instead of several?

I’m lost. I’m also starting to panic because I have an annotated bibliography to finish for tomorrow and I’m not even close. I think I need to get back to summarizing what sources I already have and seeing what connections I can make from them. But, I do wish I could concentrate my research a bit more.

One more bit that I want to collect here: There appears to be support for socially constructed knowledge in rhetoric studies and composition that weren’t connected with Aristotle’s topics of invention. Gideon O. Burton at Brigham Young University via Silva Rhetoricae states:

Although the topics of invention were the starting places for composing or generating speech or writing within the rhetorical tradition, they were not the only beginning points. From classical antiquity up to the seventeenth century, imitation was equally important for providing material and formal models for students of speaking and writing. In fact, there is room to argue that imitative praxis and pedagogy better account for rhetorical composition historically than do the abstract categories of the topics of invention. http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Canons/Invention/TOPICS%20OF%20INVENTION/TOPICS.HTM
accessed 10/31/2004