What is Composition?

Composition, according to the dictionary application that came with my laptop is "the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up; the action of putting things together; formation or construction; a thing composed of various elements." To compose is to synthesize--it's to make meaning out of a series of events, ideas, observations, ingredients, pieces. The picture above is a slice of rainbow cake that my husband and I made last winter. The cake was composed of Betty Crocker cake mix, water, oil, eggs, cream cheese frosting (homemade) and enough food coloring to change the color of our urine (I'm joking). The different colors of cake batter had to be created separately and then carefully transitioned together for the final, delicious draft.

We compose music, outfits, gardens, DVD collection organization, Halloween candy categories; we compose our own characters, how we want to be seen and profiled; we compose love letters, hate notes, birthday party invites, wedding proposals, and apologies. Every day is a composition of compositions. We go to ladies' rooms to "compose ourselves," and we may have even commanded the person in hysterics to "Compose yourself, man!" Sometimes it's overwhelming to realize that we are just a draft of drafts. We may revise ourselves in such away that it will require a deleting of past compositions, habits and hobbies we have spent years going over and adding to. Going back to grad school is starting a new draft, and we find ourselves grasping at items from our past to relate to our present and help our pages not feel so suddenly blank. It's an anxious feeling. I feel like half of a haiku in the middle of one of those looooong pieces of white paper that we used to make old school banners on Print Shop with (you know what I'm talking about? With the tear-away side edges?).

Unfortunately, and ironically, freshman students find it difficult to understand essays as compositions. The temptation is to view essays as busy work, a horrible English class hoop they must jump through in order to be an accountant or an architect. Part of teaching composition is to teach the purpose for composing anything--it is to create something good to look at, something fresh and out of the ordinary, something they are proud of creating.

Jacob Bronowski's essay "The Creative Mind" talks about creation as an act of synthesis, and he argues that the sciences are just as creative as the arts in this respect. He writes, "No scientific theory is a collection of facts. It will not even do to call a theory true or false in the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so. The Epicureans held that matter is made of atoms two thousand years ago and we are now tempted to say that their theory was true. But if we do so we confuse their notion of matter with our own. John Dalton in 1808 first saw the structure of matter as we do today, and what he took from the ancients was not their theory but something richer, their image: the atom. Much of what was in Dalton‘s mind was as vague as the Greek notion, and quite as mistaken. But he suddenly gave life to the new facts of chemistry and the ancient theory together, by fusing them to give what neither had: a coherent picture of how matter is linked and built up from different kinds of atoms. The act of fusion is the creative act." I would argue that composition is the ability to synthesize in this same way. The personal narrative is a fusing of experience with meaning; writing a research paper is fusing separate sources into a fresh thesis; writing a critique is fusing critical theories into a chosen article.

The trick of composition is keeping the fusions stable and cohesive, turning it into what you want it to look like, and making it look appetizing to the audience. And that's where rhetoric comes in. Or something. Am I still typing?