This paper highlights and applies past inventional theory to current critical thinking and writing practices. The paper provides a contextual background to capture the tension between opposed sides in the college composition discipline regarding the usefulness of elements of the classical rhetorical tradition. Next, the paper reviews one well-known ancient technique from Quintilian (a three-question heuristic for creative and critical thought). The paper then presents a speculative exploration of Chaim Perelman's theory of "presence" as a critical topos, which concerns the rhetorical strategies of concreteness, repetition, illustration, evocative imagery, and dramatic devices such as "hypotyposis,""sermocinatio," dialogism, analogy, and metaphor. The paper concludes that Perelman's theory of presence could be taught to students both as a heuristic for writing and a critical tool for studying how argumentation is built along strongly emotional lines. (Contains 51 references.) (RS)