Remixing Composition: Intro and Chapter 1:
To be honest, the word “compositionist” bothers me. I do, however, see the need for this term in the context of Palmeri’s research. Occasionally, he does refer to "teachers of writing," and that is a breath of fresh air to me. "Compositionist" seems contrived somehow, though in scholarship circles, it seems widely accepted. So that’s my response to this term that clangs inside my brain. In addition to the clanging in my head, my spell check always highlights compostionist as misspelled.
What Palmeri says about those who “study and teach composition” (28) in “Track 1: Creativity” is more authentic and engaging than the passages on compositionists, though the terms seem interchangeable. He says Janet Emig challenges the common practice, yet misconception, that compositionists (ugh) should concentrate on alphabetic writing only. He says Emig suggests that “writing teachers should join with the ‘allied arts’” (28) in order to achieve cross curricular modalities in the writing process. Makes sense. And this too, Palmeri writes: “ … digital technologies increasingly enable students to to compose texts that blend images, sounds, and words” (28). Composition, in other words, is not just words on a page. With multimodal thinking, planning, and arranging, writing becomes a composition -- not just alphabetic text.
I agree, writing can be much more than writing – it can be a composition:
