I started this semester, never having heard the terms new media or multimodal composition. Since then, I have learned what these terms mean, and feel that I can speak on subjects relating to them. The Watson Conference helped confirm some of the initial ideas and opinions that I had. Being new to the subject I was unsure whether or not my thoughts were correct or even relevant, but hearing some of the speakers at the conference talk about the same things I had been thinking convinced me that I was capable of producing multimodal works.
The new knowledge I have gained from this class will help me write in the future. It also opens up many more options as far as my modes of composition.
English composition is no longer just text on paper, or analyzing text on paper. It is evolving right along with the technologies of today. With these evolutions, we realize that english composition is used and applied in many ways that were thought to be different and more niched, with no place in the first year composition classroom. technology is demanding us as a generation to learn to write effectively within many different modes of communication. Today there are still journalists, and traditional writers, but we must consider writing for films and television and email and even text messaging to be equally important, if not more important. As a writing student today, I feel that most of the writing that is ‘ingested’ by my peers, is for entertainment nourishment, or to communicate with other peers. It must be important then to teach these students that writing and writing form are constantly being shoved down there throats, and that they should be aware, and even critical of that fact.
There are three critical lenses that I am partial to while filling my mental stomach. Different modes of composition require different critical lenses. The first one, that I have a sweet tooth for is abstractness. I like to see abstract thoughts played out visually in movies. One movie that does this very obviously is, ‘I Heart Huckabees’, which was written and directed by David O. Russell and Jeff Baena. The movie is about a troubled environmentalist, who hires existential detectives to explain his life to him. The movie contains abstract thoughts and discusses them within the script. In this scene you can see how the director conveyed these abstract ideas visually.
The second critical lense, whose flavor I am very fond of, is approach. I am a journalism major and when reporting, the truth is of the utmost importance. If all journalists wrote nothing but the truth, just cut and dry, it would be like robots writing. Every story would be exactly the same no matter who wrote it. Hunter S. Thompson went to cover the Kentucky Derby with the intentions of showing the ironically savage, but elite southern aristocracy. He told a true story of what happened there and described flawlessly what he meant to describe. The difference, or what set his story apart from any other account of the event, was that he unintentionally became the stereotypical example that he intended to write about, turning his journalistic account of the derby’s fans into a bizarre but true narrative that provided the required facts in an interesting and unique fashion. It is all explained in a way only HST can explain it in the paragraph that starts, “I barely heard him. My eyes had finally opened enought for me to focus on the mirror. . . ” at this website : http://www.derbypost.com/hunter.html
My third favorite critical lense is visualization, and is most effective when used in traditional writing such as the Maltese Falcon. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is describing Spade ( the main character and a private detective) in his office. He is alone and begins to roll and smoke a cigarette. The book goes into great detail about each step that he takes. While reading this section of the book you feel like you can see exactly what the writer wants your mind to see. The description is so intense it almost reads like technical writing. It is so exact that when you watch the film for the first time you feel that you have seen that scene before.
I’m new to blogging. . . this is my first blog. I think once I am more familiar to this new medium I will be able to help my clothing company advertise to, and gain new customers and fans.
