The New Work of Composing

Edited by Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman

Book overview. This edited collection explores theoretical and practical questions about multimodal, digital production through lenses of rhetoric/composition, digital writing studies, English studies, and the humanities.
- Computers and Composition Digital Press
- Utah State University Press
Not Your Mother's Argument

Morgan Gresham and Roxanne Kirkwood Aftanas

Abstract. This chapter explores how identity and expectations change audience responses to our work as scholars. Using our own compositions as a point of departure, we argue that authors cannot use the master's tools of traditional argument to look at the new work of composition scholarship. As our discipline transitions to new compositions, we see the increasing expectation of a "second shift" of work that requires remediation into traditional argument if our work is to be viable. We push against this expectation, using our digital compositions to create feminist identities and scholarship.

APA Citation: Gresham, Morgan, & Aftanas, Roxanne Kirkwood. (2012). Not your mother's argument. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.), The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/chapters/gresham-aftanas/
Metadata

Honor Thy First Attempts

An overlay of composing in a digital world.

An anecdote:

I started my graduate work at an institution that was cutting, if not bleeding, edge in 1991. We had a computer-mediated classroom and connected lab. As I have explained elsewhere, although by the time I left our machines were no longer cutting edge, our thinking as compositionists, I would argue, was bleeding edge. In the name of composition, we have commanded command lines, we have MOOed, we have GUIed. We’ve had conversations, lots of conversations. We’ve created studios, we Facebook, we blog. We touch, and oui, we Wii!

Moving to a more trailing edge institution has made the work more difficult but no less important. It just takes longer—occasionally a lot longer because it gets separated from the day-to-day work of writing program administration.

I have for some time desperately wanted to create a video about the work that I do. The subject of the video that I wanted to capture would change according to the random daily crisis of my program (for example, outcomes assessment) or in the subtle shifts in the research I do in pro-ana websites (a shift to pro-ana videos, a site ripe for study) but my daily crises impede. So finally I decided that if I don't make the video for the next conference presentation, I am just never going to get there. I will become further and further behind the field, trailing and trailing into obsolesence.

And then, a happy coincidence of sorts: Our Watson presentation, which was hampered in some ways because we didn't have institutional access to certain programs, enabled us to morph the idea into our CCCC presentation. And at long last, my first—imperfect—videography attempt:

Thursday, June 9, 2011

The New Work of Composing

Edited by Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman

Not Your Mother's Argument

Morgan Gresham and Roxanne Kirkwood Aftanas

Metadata

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.