What is Composition?

Simply put, I think that overall, in this class I have learned that there is no single definition of what composition truly is. It may span from persuasive rhetoric to the physical process of writing, from writing papers as a student to grading papers as a teacher. I think that what composition does most effectively is challenging people to be innovative, persuasive, and understood.

As we learned in James Miles’s “Born Cannibal,” language is the reason that humans can be good and love to overcome inherent evil, and language is a form of composition. Yet, we also learned that language alone is not enough to make humans what they are; language must be abstract. Joseph, a feral child, lived without any abstract language, and so although he was not a cannibal, he was not on the same developed level as other humans. We then learned that language works through rhetoric, which Aristotle states is persuasion, encompassing logos, ethos, and pathos. Toulmin argues that logos, ethos, and pathos still are not substantive enough to thrust humans into their upper intelligence because they simply explain why people do things and are convinced; we still need to understand how. Toulmin claims that you must have a claim and data that cannot be challenged, but that a warrant can be made, and must be challenged. This cognitive challenge of ideas is another progression into composition, but we as students still have not reached that point.

We were then told that language is a technique for changing people, but writing is the technique used for shaping and changing an entire civilization. (Enter composition.) At this point, the combination of simple language, abstract language, rhetoric, persuasion, and the Toulmin model have all progressed into what composition really does: challenges the mind. Yet, composition on its own is not powerful enough to provoke change; the composition must somehow be shared with the world, and so the printing press was invented. Printing produces powerful ideas, yet students and people in general still claim to hate English. Why? Because the subject matter is abstract, teachers should try to teach thinking instead of teaching to the grade, which so many people learn to hate.

Jim Berlin states that “we’re not just teaching to write, we’re teaching epistemology,” the search for truth. There are three basic ways to know something: the objective, the subjective, and the ideal rhetorical. Composition offers this rhetorical way to know things in that it offers interaction between individuals, so long as it is used effectively. One way that we have learned to effectively communicate this knowledge is with the internet and most specifically the idea of “Web 2.0,” which enables interaction across mass media. Yet, even still, it is not always effective, as we have seen with Texas Tech’s own TOPIC/ICON program for first-year “composition” students.

So if we have overcome the barrier of physical communication, how can composition be as effective as possible in challenging thought? Lanham proposes that writing should be a fun activity, and that we should look at language, rather than through it. We should learn to enjoy playing with words, and we should encourage our students to do the same. As future composition teachers, we must understand that innovation leads to learning, and so we cannot confine our students to predetermined standards of how to run a classroom, or even write a paper. We must rise to the challenge of teaching something that cannot be defined. We must teach our students how to think, so that perhaps they can challenge our ideas, and what it means to truly compose a poem, an essay, a book, or even a blog.