Toward a Composition Made Whole

by Jody Shipka

To many academics, composition still represents typewritten texts on 8.5” x 11” pages that follow rote argumentative guidelines. In Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka views composition as an act of communication that can be expressed through any number of media and as a path to meaning-making. Her study offers an in-depth examination of multimodality via the processes, values, structures, and semiotic practices people employ everyday to compose and communicate their thoughts.      Shipka counters current associations that equate multimodality only with computer, digitized, or screen-mediated texts, which are often self-limiting. She stretches the boundaries of composition to include a hybridization of aural, visual, and written forms. Shipka analyzes the work of current scholars in multimodality and combines this with recent writing theory to create her own teaching framework. Among her methods, Shipka employs process-oriented reflection and a statement of goals and choices to prepare students to compose using various media in ways that spur their rhetorical and material awareness. They are encouraged to produce unusual text forms while also learning to understand the composition process as a whole. Shipka presents several case studies of students working in multimodal composition and explains the strategies, tools, and spaces they employ. She then offers methods to critically assess multimodal writing projects.      Toward a Composition Made Whole challenges theorists and compositionists to further investigate communication practices and broaden the scope of writing to include all composing methods. While Shipka views writing as crucial to discourse, she challenges us to always consider the various purposes that writing serves.

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 30, 2011

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. I blame all my New Media friends for not telling me about this book sooner or more vigorously. So the key idea is that “composition” and “technology” need to be expanded terms: composition does not equal writing and technology does not equal digital. Very empowering for me as someone who kind of thinks you need to know how to code if you want to be “new media.” Well-written and kind of a page turner for an academic book. My only complaint is that she allows others to set the term “creative” as a pejorative.


Here are some highlights:
“I am concerned that emphasis placed on ‘new’ (meaning digital) technologies has led to a tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multi-media, or still more broadly speaking, composition with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitalized, screen-mediated texts” (8) and “we have allowed ourselves to trade in one bundle of texts and techniques for another: pro-verbal for pro-digital” (11).

“when our scholarship fails to consider, and when our practices do not ask students to consider, the complex and highly distributed processes associated with the production of texts (and lives and people), we run the risk of overlooking the fundamentally multimodal aspects of all communicative practice” (13).
“A composition made whole recognized that whether or not a particular clasroom or group of students are wired, students may still be afforded opportunities to consider how they are continually positioned in ways that require them to read, respond to, align with… a steaming interplay o words, images, sounds, scents, and movements” (21).

Composition’s fraught relationship with communication (31).
From Wertsch “all activity is mediated by tools, whether by psychological tools and/or by technical tools such as hammers, nails [etc]” (43).

Process and media: “To label a text multimodal or nonmodal based on its final appearance alone discounts, or worse yet, renders invisible the contributions made by a much wider variey of resources, supports, and tools.

Qtd. Hass “precisely because, through use, these technologies become transparent” (55).

"I suggest that students who are provided with tasks that do not specify what their final products must be and that ask them to imagine alternative contexts for their work come away from teh course with a more expansive, richer repertoire of meaning-making and problem-solving strategies" (101)

When a writer goes for a run to clear her mind, “what might otherwise look like nonwork--taking a break from the task at hand--functioning as an integral part of the composer’s overall process” (60)

Has students analyse works in long statements assessing rhetoricality of what it is saying, what choices they made (including material) and why they went with this plan and not the others that presented themselves? (114)

Draws on Cheryl Ball and sums up that “texts are often labeled experimental when (or simply because) audiences are not used to recognizing their meaning-making strategies (133).