Journal 5 -- Haven Talley

I define writing as an act of expressing your thoughts into coherent sentences.

It is formulating ideas, opinions and thoughts into words, in response to an exigence or question. Writing is usually written on a particular substrate or typed into an online document/digital medium.

When I think of composing, I think about anything from creating a website to composing music. Composing something doesn’t necessarily mean you are creating a product of your written word.

One thing that writing and composing share is that “they both imply a process and a product.”  *

The denotation for composing is, “The action of putting together or combining; the fact of being put together or combined; combination (of things as parts or elements of a whole).”

The definition for writing is, “The action of one who write, in various senses; the penning or forming of letters or words; the using of written characters for purposes of record, transmission of ideas, etc.”  

What I gathered from reviewing the literal definition of the two terms is that the difference between writing and composing is that one deals solely with writing and the other deals with a range of different materials that are pieced together to form a product (writing is a form of composing). Writing can be a form of composing but composing isn’t always a form of writing.

Essentially, writing enables you to formulate your thoughts into coherent sentences.

Composing allows you to combine thoughts/ideas/materials to create a product.

In my What is a Text? Class last semester, I created an intertextual project. This project helped me obtain a better understanding for composing (piecing together numerous artifacts to formulate a new product) and intertextuality, as intertextuality is a form of composing.

My five key terms that I think of while writing/composing are:  

1.     Creativity – Your unique way of conveying a message/expressing your thoughts/composing a product

2.     Personal Ideas – New ideas to contribute to society

3.     Connections – Making connections between relevant artifacts in composing a product or formulating opinions in writing

4.     Organization – coherent, understandable structure

5.     Audience – keeping the audience in mind while writing/composing, so that your piece is effective and appealing to your target audience.