Tuesday July 17th - Middleton, Fulwiler

I understand the authors' concern that the ingrained writing model of plan/write/revise is a bit basic or uninteresting given the amount of thought and scholarship that has been devoted to process, but I wonder if it works for some people, even in the realm of video production. Perhaps we could think that we’ve done a disservice to children and adults who grew up with this model and now it has become so ingrained that other means of composition aren’t as effective because they are simply unfamiliar. I thought it was interesting that the authors discussed that even in video production today, this text-based model is still the most prized in terms of how to compose in video. I wonder whether that is always necessarily a bad thing. I thought of how our class was given a script outline as a way to plan our videos for the final project. I also thought of screenwriters for TV and movies who certainly write a detailed script before filming (though this may be a practical or financial matter more than one that has to do with composition theory). I certainly think the composing process is significantly influenced when the medium is changed from alphabetic text to something else, but I’m suspicious of the notion that plan/write/revise is inherently detrimental to students’ compositions. The examples described in this article speak to this issue which is one I briefly raised in class. The phrase “It worked on paper but not on film” resonates with me because I found that translating my alphabetic teaching philosophy into an infographic was not exactly a straightforward translation. It turned out that I really had to distill some of my beliefs into singular images and concise fragments of text, and doing this actually reshaped my ideas into ones that aren’t always explicit alphabetically. Based on the preliminary work that I’ve done on my video, I presume I will experience the same thing. Because different tools are at one’s disposal in video composition, they are probably inclined to base their content around the tools that are available.

There appears to be significant variation in everyone’s composing processes across mediums, so it is important not to be prescriptive about a model process, but to be aware of the range of ways people approach composition projects.