The Role of Invention in Digital Dating Site Profile Composition

• This study investigates writers enacting rhetorical invention in a digital dating site.
• The findings suggest digital writers employ a spectrum of approaches to invention.
• Participants expressed concerns about ethos, pathos, and impression management.

This study investigates writers enacting rhetorical invention within a non-academic digital environment. The data described and analyzed came from dating site participants who completed surveys about their composing processes and who provided profiles they had previously written for a dating site. In particular, the investigation considers the inventional choices writers make to represent themselves through discourse in this particular environment. Qualitative textual analysis led to the identification of these digital writers’ invention strategies along four dimensions: assessing self, assessing task, planning/composing text, and assessing interaction. The findings complicate our understanding of the relationship between rhetorical invention, audience, and impression management and suggest that rather than engaging in invention within the discovery versus creation binary, digital writers actually employ a spectrum of approaches to invention. Overall, this study suggests that audience is deeply connected to invention throughout the profile composing process: the participants expressed concerns about ethos, pathos, and the process of impression management within their writing, and these concerns all connected to audience in various ways.