Rest Stop!

So now that we’re at this rest stop it’s time to reflect on we’ve studied so laboriously over the last seven weeks. All that information is just jumping around in our brains and now that we have it, a lot us don’t know what we’re going to do with it. Composition, rhetoric, remediation, terms and theories all piled on top of each other and only more weeks of it to come. So where exactly did this knowledge come from, anyway? I’ve always felt that knowledge was something to be sought after. The way I look at it we can discover knowledge and we can share it with others but knowledge is never really something created or new to the world itself. Knowledge is something to be found within the world and it’s merely waiting to be collected and then used appropriately or sometimes inappropriately, as the case may be and then reshaped and remodeled and sent back out again. When the type of knowledge is something I’m passionate about, it brings on treasure hunter’s enthusiasm within me.





We as EWMers are in our own ways caretakers of knowledge. Those of us working in print and publishing, illustrations ect.. will be responsible for sharing knowledge, sending it out into the world and the writers will be reshaping knowledge. The knowledge we learn in this class is the backbone of most of our future careers.



Let’s take a moment to reconsider composing and how it ties in with reflection. Most of us would say that reflection when related to composition is just another word for revision and they would be partially right. Reflection is a part of the revision process which cannot be done without first looking back at our past composition experiences and work. Yancey says “…reflection entails a looking forward to goals we might attain, as well as a casting backward to see where we have been." Which means that you are looking both back at past work and also forward into the future of what could be. I take this to mean that you’re not just revising a piece of work, when you are reflecting on something you’re also looking for ways to improve yourself as a writer over all. What worked this time, what did not, and how can I avoid doing this again in the future but how can I duplicate that instead?



Knowing what I know now, especially about how reflection ties into composing. I have to reexamine my own theory of composing. Where it all starts, as always is a need for something, a solution to problem, a kind of knowledge, a story to be told and then I still hold true to that spark that comes when you have an idea that will make everything write. You can spend your time trying to force it but more often than not the click or the spark will come on its own. Now, where my theory/process of composing differs from my previous reasoning has to do with my beliefs about knowledge. The idea that we are waiting for of the knowledge we are looking for to find a solution isn’t something we create ourselves entirely. It is a reshaping of knowledge, other ideas. We do this all the time in composing; using other’s ideas in stories to inspire us and in our essays to back up our own ideas. When once we know what we’re doing we have to decide on a medium to work in and then onward to understand that medium. When the process is nearly down we are once again at reflection and revision, the step in the process where we can reevaluate our work and ourselves.