Let's Just Catch our Breath....

When learning a vast array of new information, it is always important to just sit back, take a breath, and reflect upon what you have learned so far. Throughout this semester this class has challenged me to look at words and key terms that I have heard in conventional language and apply them to rhetoric and composition. Words such as audience and genre have really challenged me to open up my mind and think outside the box and think of how these key terms apply to me as a composer rather than just fall back on their traditional meaning that I am more used to hearing and understanding.

A word such as audience has shown to mean more than simply the people who are taking in and viewing a particular medium, but according to Bitzer an audience is also “capable of serving as the mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce.” Genre is another word that I have learned has a lot more context than what I have previously known. Devitt defines genre as “dynamic patterning of human experience, as one of the concepts that enable us to construct our writing world.” She also goes on later to say that genre helps to make meaning, and that any form of composition can be important or worthless depending on its genre. A good example of this would be commercials, you are more likely to believe a professionally filmed and produced commercial from a company like Ford, rather than believe a corny and repetitive infomercial.

Knowledge is something that always exists and will continue to exist until the end of time. But the main question surrounding knowledge is if it is ever new? In my opinion knowledge is never new and is more just passed on from person to person. Most things that people will learn in their lifetimes to give them knowledge have already been learned by someone else and is being passed on. Take what you learned growing up in elementary school as an example. In elementary school you are taught reading and writing along with basic skills in history and science. Although all of this information is new to you at the time, you are the not the first person to ever learn these things. Before you ever even started school someone else learned these things and put them into the textbook so that you could someday learn it.

Throughout the semester of taking this class my theory of composing has changed and as far as I’m concerned, it will continue to change until this course is completed. At the beginning of this semester my view on composing was that it was all about expression. I stated that the process of composition consists of being inspired by something, and then it leading to you expressing those feelings through some medium. Although I still feel that a large part of composing comes from expression, I now see that it doesn’t always have to be about being inspired and expressing your feelings. Something can be composed simply for the reason of composing. An example would be papers and projects for classes. I don’t compose these things because of some deep emotional feeling I get to compose, I simply do it for the sake of doing it. Any composer’s theory of composition is something unique to them and it is something that I can continue to build upon though completion of this course.