Inventio in the context of "Literary topos"

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion", and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he called it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

Dispositio is the system used for the organization of arguments in the context of Western classical rhetoric. The word is Latin, and can be translated as "organization" or "arrangement".

It is the second of five canons of classical rhetoric (the first being inventio, and the remaining being elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) that concern the crafting and delivery of speeches and writing.

Elocutio (lexis or phrasis in Greek) is a Latin term for the mastery of rhetorical devices and figures of speech in Western classical rhetoric. Elocutio or style is the third of the five canons of classical rhetoric (the others being inventio, dispositio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) that concern the craft and delivery of speeches and writing.

Memoria was the term for aspects involving memory in Western classical rhetoric. The word is Latin, and can be translated as "memory".

It was one of five canons in classical rhetoric (the others being inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and pronuntiatio) concerned with the crafting and delivery of speeches and prose.

Pronuntiatio was the discipline of delivering speeches in Western classical rhetoric. It is one of the five canons of classical rhetoric (the others being inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and memoria) that concern the crafting and delivery of speeches. In literature the equivalent of ancient pronuntiatio is the recitation of epics (Aris. Po. 26.2.).

As with memoria, the canon that dealt with the memorization of speeches, pronuntiatio was not extensively written about in Classical texts on rhetoric. Its importance declined even more, once the written word became the focus of rhetoric, although after the eighteenth century it again saw more interest in the works of men such as Gilbert Austin.