Composition Ideas
Also/or thoughts in the making
In my own writing process, drafting and revising is a highly iterative and time-consuming process. It can vary slightly depending on the project, such as an academic essay, an ePortfolio, or a cover letter. But my composition process (almost) always involves multiple revisions over longer periods of time, which allows me to generate ideas throughout the revision process.
That’s why, for my draft today, I present more of an annotated collection of assets, ideas, and materials that reflect the intended direction of my composition in anticipation of a long revision process ahead.
This assemblage of thoughts also includes a general outline of what I will construct in my critical composition and concludes with questions I still have for my readers.
My Multimodal Composition
For my multimodal project, I will create my own hand-bound book in order to contemplate the book as a multimodal object entwined with literacy. The creative component of the project will be the hand-made book I create, while the critical component of the project will be an academic essay enclosed within the book. The essay will make use of the affordances provided by the book as a medium by including pictures, playing with layout and design, and making conscious choices related to font choice, size, and color.
The critical component, an essay with photographs, will evoke the historical, materials, and rhetorical conditions that surround books as multimodal objects. I intend to take an analytic and reflective stance to understanding the book as a medium of learning, communication, and meaning-making. My proposed project design challenges me to invent from within the medium I want to study. Not only will I write a multimodal scholarly essay about the book, but I will then present that information from within a book I make.
In a class discussion about sound, we talked about Ceraso’s notion that sounds aren’t just about something else, but that they are something themselves. With this project, I want to say that books aren’t just about something else, but they are something themselves.
Scholarly Sources & Foundations
My composition as a whole contends with the idea of the medium as the message — the book as a medium sending a message about literacy and multimodal form. I hope to present the book as a new media text that emphasizes its materiality and multimodality, demonstrating what writer-designers can do with the medium of books as a way to move the medium towards its future potentials.
To that end, I intend to draw from Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong to discuss literacy and its effects on communities. In my design, I follow Wysocki’s notion that “alphabetic text is always part of what must be visually arranged and can be designed to call more or less visual attention to itself” (58). I am further inspired by Jasmine Ulmer’s “Minor Gestures: Slow writing and everyday photography” which juxtaposes photographs with academic writing formatted in poetic verse, playing with the possibilities and restrictions of academic journal format. I intend to use a similar format for my own critical composition within the book.
In addition to drawing from class readings, I will research new lines of inquiry related to the affordances of books, the history of books, and books as multimodal texts.
Some of the questions I have are…
Does my project effectively include both a creative + critical component? Is it okay if the critical component (i.e., an academically styled essay) is combined with the creative component (i.e., included within the pages of the book?
I wonder what readers find interesting or intriguing about this topic. What questions do you have about the book? What do you find interesting about books as a medium or books as multimodal objects?
What challenges do you think I might come up against as I create my composition?