As this chapter demonstrates, we invent and are invented by the conversations we have on IM and Facebook, the photos and videos we post and view on Flickr and YouTube, and the blogs we read and compose: the commonplaces associated with invention that we seek out and discuss are multimodal, not only text-based maxims but also literal and metaphorical visual and audio representations of ideas and topics, which we've discovered as audience members and remixed for our audience(s).

we view collaboration as crucial to invention as a social act

he use of writing groups in and out of classroom settings (Bruffee 1984; Macrorie 1988; Moss, Highberg & Nicolas 2004; Murray 1985) allows writers to respond to each other's work less as a form of critique than as a way to engage in a conversation that is beneficial to all participants.

s evidenced by Plato's use of dialogues throughout his work (even if they are fictionalized conversations), talking to and with other people allows for a pooling of knowledge that can then be rearticulated by a rhetor to further complicate the values and beliefs of a community.

1. even when a writer composes as an individual, "the inventing 'self' is socially influenced

"invention is a social act"

the flesh-colored body forms the backdrop of the entire text, and white folded sheets of paper scatter over the body, ordered, structurally balanced, yet non linear—each sheet of paper contains a deeper, entangled narrative tributary that builds toward a larger, intertextual argument.

"I'm a text. Sometimes I think this metaphor is faulty, especially since my body isn't booklike, and, although I do have a spine, I don't have pages or a cover....My body is text personified"

We can transform our methodologies; we can move the body from the background to the foreground, as enacted by feminist and disability studies scholars in a variety of media.

We tend to metaphorically replace or cover the body with 'text,' passively reading the body as a figurative representation of social and cultural codes perhaps in order to resist the binary reading of the body as biological, as expressive.

“mind-body complex,” is ever-present, ever-collaborative.

The body’s competencies and skills are distinct from discourse, although in some cases they can produce discourse or can be read discursively”

The body is intricately entangled with a multitude of overlapping domains and branches, opening passages and possibilities for diverse meaning-making encounters.

a corporeal literacy points us to the material dimension of writing-reading, to meaning's reliance on our physical participation in the world"

The body rhetorically functions as a topos, or commonplace, across disciplines, across theoretical stances and epistemologies, and across experiential standpoints.

Along with incorporating associative, remixed composing into our pedagogy, it's also important that composition and rhetoric specialists (at least sometimes) compose scholarly texts that resist linear print models--that we compose texts which show rather than tell (Ball 2004) about the ways in which associative juxtaposition can provoke new insight.

For example, Jeff Rice has drawn on analysis of hip-hop composing practices to argue for a writing pedagogy that "favors discovery over the restricted topic sentence since writers composing with juxtapositions do not begin with an understanding of what they will be writing about...Instead, writers look for ways to juxtapose from a variety of categories and subjects (the sampling process of juxtaposition) in order to invent"

hypermedia

-crafting new knowledge through the process of making and interpreting unexpected connections

and others have shown), it is also true that digital technologies open up new possibilities for practicing creative juxtaposition in our pedagogy and scholarship.

In order to generate chaos, writers need to resist narrowing focus and coming to closure too quickly; rather, writers who learn the "uses of chaos" (Berthoff 1981 p. 68) come to value the process of gathering and juxtaposing disparate materials in order to generate a 'new' idea.

"meanings don't come out of the air, we make them out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, syntactic fragments, from the mysterious and unformed. When we teach pre-writing as a phase of the composing process, what we are teaching is not how to get a thesis statement but the generation and uses of chaos"

Composing is a process of making connections, rearranging materials (words, images, concepts) in unexpected ways. The first words, images, and concepts that come to our minds are often the most obvious / the most expected / the most banal. Thus, if we wish to be creative, we can benefit greatly by gathering a wide array of disparate materials and then taking the time to experiment with combining and re-arranging these materials in novel ways (Hogan 2003).

“There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea: the combination or association of two or more ideas he (sic) already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was previously unaware”