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| Within rhetorical invention, the topics or topoi are basic categories of relationships among ideas, each of which can serve as a template or heuristic for discovering things to say about a subject. "Topics of invention" literally means "places to find things." Aristotle divided these into the "Common" and "Special" topics of invention, the former being more general, the latter relevant to each of the three branches of oratory.
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. See Also
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