After reading this chapter, it made me think of the lecture Derek gave on Wikirage. Not sure if I have the name correct, but on page 123-124 the author begins, “The logic of the box…” and this description is very similar to a thinking process. It’s the type of process that was presented in Wikirage and the type of process that I know I experience as I write, or pre-write.

It’s all the thoughts that I jot down, even the ones that make no sense to others, but perfect sense to me. It that part of my writing where I’m not writing, but my mind is. My fingers follow along to the stream-of-conscious banter that is happening while I’m thinking out my main ideas. They’re not main ideas yet, but small chunks of “short, amorphous” think-tank strategies for furthering cohesion. My sticky notes, marginalia, and ripped corners of paper with ink-blotted scribbles are theories and evidences in their prepubescent stages.

That is what Sirc is saying here. Now I understand why web designers get offended when people say that what they’re doing isn’t composing, because this chapter proves to me that it is. Actually, I think I felt this way all along, but I needed something to push me. The nudge I get from this chapter reveals something I felt was true all along, and that is, composition has no business being defined as a process that involves only alphabetic structure. If we narrow it to that alone, we rob students of the vast choices of creativity and innovation that design, in general offers.

This doesn’t mean that I think a structured research paper or essay is in any way less valuable. What I think it means, is that composition is now in a place where, perhaps, it may stand alone in its discipline. Maybe, we need to redetermine how it should be organized curriculum wise, and revamp our institutions to allow it, its own branch of study. Maybe, composition does not need to ride the coat tails of reading and literature anymore. It’s clear to me that the composition community, in its own right, has a much larger space to examine its purpose and implementation, than I ever assumed before.