Reading Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe’s article about multimodality and composition felt a bit challenging but resonated with me about my deeper feelings on teaching writing snd writing in general. First and foremost and I might catch some shade for saying this but the writing process isn’t fun. I could go log into my twitter right this moment and see prolific writers posting about their pain and suffering with getting anything written on the page. For writing instructors and other writers, this is less sad but mostly hilarious. I think to a degree, it takes a little bit of lying to ourselves to say that the process is enjoyable. I often spend time at some point during the semester having the discussion with my students that the writing process can feel difficult and even dull at times. If you regularly experience anxiety, I even think that an appropriate metaphor for writing is the feeling of having a cage match with yourself. To get it done, you just need to sit down, grab your writing tool, and push through all the ways your brain is just telling you to sit still and remain safe, not to think. At least this is something I like to share with my students because they get some commisserable joy out of this discussion.

Why do I bring this up though? I feel the goal post for the writing discipline is always on the move. We constantly have to defend our place in academia and frankly it is tiring but this can also be an opportunity for growth. Writing seems to no longer be a good enough reason alone to teach a course so now we have to sometimes dress up something with the freshest tech. I even taught a course about rhetoric and memes in an effort to freshen up an aging discipline. It felt difficult and unnatural because I was asking my students to write out their ideas and execute them in ways that I had previously never done myself in a comp course. Creating video essays, original memes, etc. all seemed sacrilegious in a writing course. I worried that I could not quite fairly grade that kind of work for writing quality and instead opted for grading effort. This article made me realize that I have definitely given in to a new era of teaching writing but I like to address multimodality in composition as not something completely separate from writing but to call it what it is: fancily veiled composition.