On Composition

Welcome to the blog! I'll be using this space as a kind of "running" diary of sorts. Essentially, I'll be posting thoughts about composition as I move through coursework and dive deeper into the field's discourse. If you've taken the time to explore the website, you've already come to know about some of the bigger projects I'm working on (i.e., affective mapping), but as I'm working on those projects I anticipate side-projects and other questions to come up.

To begin the blog, I'd like to address one of the side-projects that has already come up so far this year; I'm wondering what students, and the general public really, think about composition. What do they think the purpose of a composition course is?

From what I've seen so far, I think most people see the composition course as a place to learn the mechanics of writing, which is really sort of ironic considering scholarly discourse often bemoans pedagogy that addresses mechanical needs (current-traditional). Students place value, if they do at all, in the writing course only because they feel like they need to know how to write in order to further their own personal interests, which often have nothing to do with English as a profession or communication as social beings.

At the heart of the class, I think, is an ontological need to communicate. Composition means being able to communicate in some kind of form and writing courses should place less importance on prescribed forms of traditional alphabetic composition and more on enabling students to interact and live within a multiliterate, multimodal world.

I created a short podcast on the topic--check out the link here: https://soundcloud.com/user-275362996/podcast

There's more to be said, and more research to be done, but I think first-year composition programs need a perceptual face-lift. Not for an audience of academics, but rather the general public. I'm not sure publishing rhetoric in an academic journal would reach the necessary audience if the goal is to change the perception of the general public. Rather, websites and in-class conversations might be a more productive means by which to change the perception.

These blog posts will be informal and relatively brief, and I'll update them frequently. If you have thoughts on any topic, leave a comment below!