Margaret Syverson - What is an Ecology of Composition?

Syverson, M. (1999). Introduction: What is an Ecology of Composition, in The Wealth of Reality; An Ecology of CompositionCarbondale: Southern Illinois Press. pp 1 - 27

Syverson suggests that an ecology is a 'set of interrelated and interdependent complex systems' (3) and the ecology of a complex system is 'a network of independent agents - people,atoms, neurons, or molecules, for instance - act and interact with each other, simultaneously reacting to and co-constructing their own environment.' (3)

Without a doubt, the writing process: thinking, drafting, composing, editing, rewriting, rethinking, revisiting, publishing, etc is a complex system of writer, editors, publishers, audiences, peer reviewers, self, other, bureaucracies, fate, luck and chance - an ecology of much interaction, all the time. yet, the web is vast and it isn't as isolated as traditional writing venues. Time magazine claimed "YOU" were the person of the year, and when I look at that, that means ME. I can write as I wish when I wish to on what I want to and send it out into the great whatever.

I suppose, though, a new question becomes, so what? Do only those who write to be published in traditional venues deserve credit as the genuine writers, or can Sally Mae Wigginbottom of Boise, Idaho, who has kept notebooks and journals since the age of seven and who has never published be considered a writer, too? What should writing instructors really push from their writers? Do we want to push for a power hierarchy like that which already exists?

Syverson notes that our system is also adaptable. It can change.

On audience awareness, Syverson writes this: "...we would take a similar approach to the co-construction of the writing process by readers, who are not merely passive recipients of the text in this ecology of composition but active constituents of it: situated, like writers and texts, in a physical, psychological, social, temporal, and spatial network of relations. Even in this extremely abbreviated overview, we can readily admit that such a view of the composing situation is indeed complex." (7)

There are four attributes to the ecological system that can lend itself to composition: distribution, emergence, embodiment and enaction (7).

"We bring forth a textual world as we are writing it." (16)

Syverson has me thinking on many levels and I love her for that. i will end, though, with "Typically, composition research has posited a triangle of writer, text, and audience and has tended to single out the write, the text or the audience as the focus of analysis." (23). Yet, as Syverson notes, these traditions often ignore the psychological, social, temporal or physical dimensions of writing.

I hear my good ol' friend Gina Amaro screaming, EVERYTHING IS POLIITICAL. Yes, and language is even more political. The fact that I am using cyberspace to think about readings from a class at a Private University where students pay a big chunk of money to attend (and that I come from a place that was outside of the discourse spoken there) is highly political. Of course, I type in English, too, which is the latest in the ever-evolving Western World: post industrialization, post imperialism, post Chaucerian, etc. That I do this is because they did that.

I want to buy this book in its entirety.