Shipka Introduction

I didn’t really have a reaction to project 3, it was more just kind of an “oh okay, cool, that’s what we’re doing next” moment. I think this assignment is actually pretty cool and interesting. As far as English and rhetoric classes go, I have never had a project like this. Most of the projects in those classes were either papers, speeches, or power points, so to be assigned this is unorthodox to what I would have originally expected from a class like this. However, I think it is cool that it takes from Shipka and other rhetoricians saying that the medium we choose or are required to write in should be changing with the technology we have, instead of research paper after research paper. Twenty years ago, this project would be damn near impossible or at least difficult if you could not draw, but now with the technology and software we have, it seems relatively simple to do.

Composition made whole refers to the view that any and all composition is composition regardless of medium. For example, she talks about a student who wrote an entire research paper on a pair of ballet shoes instead of a traditional paper, and a teacher makes a joke about it, instead of recognizing that that was a rhetorical choice the author made. She also talks about texting, emails, playing games online, and more, because people do not see these as writing since they associate writing to traditional papers, which Shipka is trying to get away from. Even though these aren’t typically seen as composition, she argues that they still are composition because they are still writings, just in a different medium than people are used to. This project draws from Shipka because rather than having us write a paper on what our identity is or something along those lines, we have to create a drawing or edit a picture in order to convey the same concepts.