5 (de)Composition Keywords
For the past twenty years, I’ve been looking for discussion of rhetoric that was useful for my first-year composition students and me. Never found one. In 2018, I started to put together a kind of glossary of keywords, inspired a bit by what Raymond Williams did for cultural studies back in the 1970s. Indeed, following Williams’s lead, I draw pretty heavily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for definitions of our keywords. I also owe Kathy Yancey and the crew that has been thinking about teaching (composition) for transfer. Their work convinced me that beginning college writers (as opposed to beginning writers) need to have some keywords at hand if they are going to become able to use what they learn in college composition in other writing situations. These keywords name what I sometimes call our “big ideas” in college composing.
I’ve published my keywords in a series of sections in this web text, and they are a work in process. I’m steadily adding in more ideas from stuff I’m reading. Ultimately, the students with whom I learn about college composition add to these pages as well. In time, these keywords may become a text that is relevant and useful.
For now, I have divided up these keywords into 5 sections (each living in a “part” in this web text):
- Foundations
- Rhetoric
- Conventions
- Critical Analysis
- Design Processes
These categories kind of mirror what one organization, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (the WPA), thinks college composers need to be able to talk about in order to write effectively in college. There is some overlap between these buckets, and none of them offer everything that could or maybe even should be said. Still, knowing something about each of these domains will get us started on becoming college composers who can explain and, I hope, replicate what they do.
Two other things. First, in the keywords, I find myself shifting between the verbs write, compose, design, and say. I seem to use these verbs almost interchangeably. When I went to college, students mostly wrote papers by hand or on typewriters (I’m that old). Now, they write, record audio, record video, create visual presentations in a handful of different apps, contribute to Google Docs and sheets, . . . , you get the point. When I say write, I really mean compose or design in a mode that makes sense for an audience.
Second, I write like me in the keywords. I use sentence fragments and upper Midwest slang and also the language of a researcher. I shuttle back and forth between various styles. That’s me. I’ll do me. You do you.