Jody Shipka and Bill Chewning

Live composition: Four variations of a telling

In "Live Composition: Four Variations of a Telling," Jody Shipka and Bill Chewning illustrate how an expanded view of rhetorical activity provides new potentials for the way composing processes are researched, theorized, and re-presented.

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Abstract: Drawing on interview data that Shipka collected in May 2003, "live composition" provides its audience with a series of diversely mediated mappings of the rhetorical, material, affective, and interpersonal strategies that one of her former first-year composition students employed while facilitating an in-class activity called Music Day. Described by Ben, the student whose composing processes are represented here, as an experience that allowed his class to “have fun with writing” and to “take writing to a different plane of thinking,” Music Day was a two-day multimodal, multipart rhetorical event. Its success depended greatly on Ben's ability to solicit his classmates' reception of, and participation in, an activity that had been specifically engineered to disrupt the day-to-day routine of the class and to invite members of the class out of their respective “comfort zones.”    

Jody Shipka is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Bill Chewning is an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County majoring in English Communication and Technology with a focus on media studies and writing pedagogy for secondary and higher education.