TIRP 5 Individual Reflection - Composition and Design

Composition and Design

The definition of the world 'composition', at least for me, carries with it connotations of a lone artist working to create something new. Prior to this assignment, I had never composed collaboratively with other people in the same space before, and so beginning the work, I was wary of what that process would like in actuality. Our project was a combined literacy and multiculturalism narrative, composed in Google docs. Each of us wrote about how experiences and background in either narrative, and then combined those individual composition to create one, cohesive narrative that was reflective of us all. As we worked, I experienced a process --  and a new literacy -- that has changed the way I view and approach composition and the significance of composing text.

What really surprised me about our project is how design and the visual became such important aspects of it. As I've said before, it was written in Google doc, which bears many similarities to a normal word processor, and has all the commonplaces that one would expect in modern typing software. With that, the visual face of a word document, such as Microsoft Word or a Google Doc, is totally in line with the cultural expectations for what such a piece of composition should look like.  As Diana George states, visual design is very much tied up with cultural assumptions about what the visual is and should do. Just as with text, each discourse community has its own commonplaces and conventions as to what the visual can and should accomplish. In the space of a google doc, and in a genre that isn't inherently specific to the visual, we were unclear on how the visual would manifest itself in our work -- or rather, how we could compose visually in a space that is primarily meant for composing text. The results, however, came totally naturally out of our process, and emerged organically from the space we were composing in.

This process of designing visually was a literacy journey in and of itself. For us, the composing the visual came out of composing the text. The first of our main design components was having a different color text for each author. This was initially done out of convenience; as a means to denote who had written who so that we didn't mix anything up. However, it soon became symbolic of what we were trying to accomplish through the project. As we spliced the individual essays into one, unified narrative, the  different colored text illustrated the collaborative nature of the process, in a way that was immediately noticeable even without reading the piece itself. As we composed text to tell our individual and collective stories, we were simultaneously composing visually in way that compounded and complemented what we were doing.

Likewise, we eliminated the divisions the document, so that there were no specific pages. The result is a one long, uninterrupted document that carries the entire narrative. In unifying the entire thing, this effect visually mirrored our intention for the project, which was to weave together disparate narratives into one, cohesive story.

This process of composing visually evokes Yancey's discussion of the content of composition, in her Key Note Address, "Made Note Only In Words: Composition in a New Key." In the following passage, she states that the process of composing is inherantly multi-modal, and combines numerous genres and conventions together in a way that contributes to meaning:

"We inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres re-mediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school."

Yancey herself starts her speech by commenting on how the presentation she's giving is multi-modal and visual; it features two PowerPoints operating concurrently, there's a lone spotlight lighting her onstage, and microphones projecting her voice into the audience. In this sense, Yancey has combined multiple modalities (Visual, text, and oral communication) into one cohesive narrative, in a way that each of the modalities embody a piece of the message. If we examine this through the lens of Marshall McLuhan's statement "The medium is the message", then the power that is inherent in these specific forms to affect content is amplified tremendously. 

The power of medium to effect intent became a real experience for me through this project. The visual aspects of our project (the multi-colored text and our lack of page divisions) changed the way I read my own words, and the words of my collaborators. The simple act of changing a text's color did just as much to affect meaning as our composing of the text. In this way, we participated in the same multi-modality that Diana George and Kathleen Yancey talk about. In this respect, multi-modality itself is just as collaborative a process as our project.