First Day Prompts

COMPOSITION

•What do you compose?

•How do you compose?

•Why is composing important?

•Who composes?

•When does composing happen?

KINDS OF COMPOSITION

Descriptive composing

Analytical composing

Argumentative composing

Reflective composing

Collaborative composing

MEDIUMS OF COMPOSITION

Spoken

Written

Musical

Material

Corporeal

Digital

As you begin preparations for this course, you need to reflect on your prior experiences with digital composition technology. First, consider the range of production technologies you are familiar with:

Microsoft Word

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Premiere Pro

Audacity

WordPress

Vimeo

Evernote

Dropbox

Also, consider the range of composing assignments you have had in your academic career.  Within which disciplines did each assignment occur?

Composing with Print Text

Composing with Non-print Materials

Collecting/Archiving Media Assets

Re-mixing Images and Audio

Layering Audio

Graphic Design

Editing Video

Next, consider your experience with the following conceptual structures and think about their relationship with the English department:

Rhetoric

Ethnography

Materiality

Digital Humanities

Historiography

New/Multi-Media

Research/Method

SET UP A BLOG

•Go to www.wordpress.com

•Sign up and create a blog exclusively for this class.

•Individualize your blog. Create an ‘ABOUT’ page with a picture of yourself and a short textual introduction of (major, hometown, interests, career aspirations, favorite movie/book, etc)

•Compose two (2) blog entries.

–First: describe your relationship with the technologies we’ve discussed today (no more than two paragraphs…bullet points OK) and provide links as needed to point to examples of your work online.  Refer to the class blog for prompts.

–Second: discuss briefly (3 sentences or so) the last documentary film you saw.

•Using your preferred email address, send a link to your blog to harmoncb (at) email.sc.edu