Outside Composition
Rather than bore my audience with an extensive research paper on climate change, I decided to choose a video I made for my eighteenth birthday as my outside composition. This piece directly relates to the projects and works done in class by encompassing the various features and vocabulary we learned. For example, the purpose of this video is to thank various people in my life who have made my past eighteen years so great. It functions rhetorically to express my gratitude towards my intended audience. I distributed my video through Youtube and it was shared and circulated via Facebook and Instagram. Through networking, this video was published multiple times and reached a larger unintended audience.
If you asked me a year ago if I considered this video a composition I would have told you, "no, this is a silly little video I made for my friends and family". I had no idea that various genres could be defined as compositions and could function rhetorically. I always felt as though a professional composition must be a written text with specific guidelines and formats. That being said, since taking ENC2135, I have learned that different forms of media and genre can be defined as compositions.
Twitter Activity
The use of my academic Twitter has been extremely helpful throughout my time in ENC2135. The class assignment was to tweet a minimum of ten tweets a week along with the hashtag #fsu2135. These tweets could encompass anything from academic announcements, to personal banter. It posed as a social platform for communication both in and out of the classroom. Each day there was a designated "tweeter" who would live tweet the class. This functioned to inform absent students of class activities, as well as due dates approaching. I often found a lot of comfort within my class twitter community. For example, when I was stressing about my Project 2, I hopped on twitter to find 10 tweets from different students who were feeling the same way. Rarely, I'd feel alone when it came to project stress. Occasionally someone would tweet something positive and encouraging and that would make me feel a lot better as well. Above all, the greatest affordance I found within the academic twitter was the accessibility between teacher and student. Mrs.Cicchino was pretty active on twitter, so if I had a pressing question, I could simply tweet her and I'd most likely get a response within a few hours. Due to Twitter being on a public platform, students with similar questions could read her response and have their own questions answered. Though, I was apprehensive towards Twitter at first, I eventually found it to be extremely helpful and informative.
Theory of Composition Blogs
Throughout my time in ENC2135 , I designed three different blogs. Each of these blogs composed a visual Theory of Composing map, along with a 200-300 word reflection. I found this exercise to be extremely helpful in familiarizing myself with new vocabulary terms, as well as their relation to each other. Each map depicted my own personal view of composing through visual components, along with ten chosen words that represent composing best to me. In the end, I found "rhetorical situation", "orator", "fitting", "genre", "rhetoric", "modes", "distribution", "audience", "network", and "circulation" to be most relevant in my definition of composing. I decided to use a heavy emphasis on symbolism within my maps to add a visually creative aspect. Along with my map being aesthetically pleasing, I wanted "symbolism" to be a hidden word in my theory of composition. Though it may not be the most important word, I believe it to hold a great value in writing and in composition as a whole. You'll notice, as I begin to further grasp my concept of composing, my map begins to change and my words slightly differ from the original. This exemplifies how the different projects and assignments furthered my initial knowledge of composing.
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