(de)Composition is about practice, about doing what composers do and talking about what we are doing. The practices at the center of composition courses seem to me to be the same whether the course is online or face-to-face, 100-level or 400-level.  My students and I do what designers do. Here’s what to expect.

Designing texts

The heart of all of my courses is a sequence of activities. In a composition course, I still call them Writing Assignments (WAs) though some are about reading and others about working with video or images or oral presentations. My WAs ask you first to identify real problems and solutions that meet real human needs and capabilities and then go through a process to produce a response that meets the needs of your audience—me, you, and maybe other folks who will make use of the text that you produce.

Playing with new tools and sources

Before you started this course, you may or may not have used Google Drive or Track Changes in Microsoft Word, may or may not have written a reflection on the way that you read texts. Our course readings will be new for almost all of you. I will ask you to learn a number of new tools and sources and write about how they might contribute to your capacity to design meanings.

Studying composing

My composition classes have always been organized around a set of core ideas about writing in college. I am always on the lookout for what ideas help my students and I get better at communicating and taking that learning with us to new contexts. My students have been one of my best sources for these ideas. The Keywords in this text gather together the ideas that my students and folks who study composition and rhetoric believe matter. That section of this text is always a work in development.

Contributing justly to discussions

Designing meanings happens in networks, often in very diverse networks. Designers listen to and respond to one another as they frame problems and arrive at solutions; good designers ensure that other’s ideas and experiences get into the design.  In order to do this sort of work, we will have to get to know one another and practice responding to one another’s ideas in ways that gives everyone a chance to participate fully.  Each of us will be responsible for asking and answering questions about our common reading so that we all have access to clear and concrete ideas to use in our writing.  Often these discussions will start in a small group of six or so writers and then go live on a class discussion or discussion board.  Sometimes, these discussions will result in presentations wherein you (often as part of a group) will teach the rest of us.

Responding generously to draft texts

Many of our activities will circle around making sense of your designs. I (and you) will post copies of sample texts (often kept anonymous) for the class to read and discuss.  This means you should be prepared for the possibility that your compositions will be read by your peers.  Hearing how other readers respond to your own designs can give you a clearer sense of the variety of ways in which your writing can be interpreted. Looking at other students’ designs will make it possible for you to analyze differences in the approaches that writers can take to a subject or a text. You’ll look at what you and other members of the class have written and discuss how the writing affects the sense made of the subject and of readers, what you sound like on a screen, and what alternative approaches you might take in your texts. You will not, then, be looking at the texts to determine if they are “good” or “bad” papers in some absolute sense but rather to determine what they are good for, and how. The first few drafts we discuss will be kept anonymous to keep the focus of class discussions on what the writing itself does rather than on who did the writing. As the course develops you will find yourselves in writing groups, exchanging feedback directly with classmates.

Reflecting critically on practices

Designers become more fluent in new discourses to the extent that they practice those discourses “reflectively,” that is, to the extent that they think about how they are using language (and other symbolic systems) in new ways and how they want to adjust their own communication practices in response to these new ways of composing.  I will ask you almost every week to think about what you have been doing and how your composing practices is (or could be) different that your habitual composing practices.