Cathing My Breath

As I read through all my past blogposts, I realize how much every keyword connects to the one before it. I never thought about how complex the composition process was until I studied each part of it in detail. It never occurred to me how often I use rhetoric in my writing and in every day life.

My composing process, like most people’s, begins with a rhetorical situation. Bitzer says “Rhetorical works belong to the class of things which obtain their character from the circumstances of the historic context in which they occur” (3). In order for me to write, I have to have a purpose. Even if I am just writing to write, writing is my rhetorical situation. There needs to be a rhetorical situation, whether abstract or concrete to think about and put into words. This also brings to mind the keyword reflection. Some people think that reflection is something we do at the end of our writing process. But in this class, I have learned that we are always reflecting throughout our composition. And I think when we begin, we have to reflect on our past experiences and search for a rhetorical situation to write about. And maybe we don’t have to search for it. Maybe we just get an epiphany and write about it right as soon as it occurs to us. It’s still a rhetorical situation.

I think it’s interesting how I can talk about my first blogpost and my last blogpost in the same paragraph. It shows how composition is an ongoing process and that everything in it overlaps. I think a good example of how things overlap in the writing process is the keyword genre. Devitt says, “To develop our new genre theory, we begin with rhetorical situation and expand it to encompass a semiotic situation and social context” (576). Once again, two terms have coincided. You cannot choose which genre you are going to work in, without first thinking about your rhetorical situation and how it could affect your writing in context. You also have to think about your audience and pick your genre to fit them. It’s another thing to reflect on. Which genre, using your past knowledge of genres, would suit your discourse the best? And sometimes genres themselves overlap. You could write something in  for print that could also work for online.

Remediation is another important keyword, because like reflection, it is all around us. We were born into a generation in which remediation is happening almost every year. There is always a new form of technology emerging and it can be a bit overwhelming. I think my favorite line in Bolter in Grusin’s book is “Remediation is the mediation of mediation” (55). As ridiculous and repetitive as this sounds, it completely true. Remediation itself is repetitive because you can’t just create something out of nothing. There needs to be an older mediation to develop from. We are basically taking a piece, or pieces of the older form and making something bigger and better out of that. I think remediation goes hand in hand with knowledge. I don’t believe that we actually create knowledge. I think it is always there, and we just have to look for it. And remediation helps us with this. By learning about what is out there and applying it to new things, we are creating. Knowledge is like a treasure hunt. We search and search for this buried treasure and then when we find it, we use that fortune to build from. We create castles and monuments with this treasure. I think in this class, we are looking for that treasure so that when we move on to bigger and better things, we can be the ones finding the knowledge to remediate things into technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about yet.

Throughout this class, I have learned that there is such a structure and a backbone present in the composition process. And good writing stems from writers that follow this, but know where things overlap and how to bend the rules. Amanda Saxton mentions in her blogpost that she has realized that there is no strict formula for writing and composing. I think it’s interesting that there really is a formula, but every writer can use it differently. That is the beauty of writing. We all see things differently and use the rules in our own ways.