Screen Shot

At first, when I took the screen shot I thought the assignment was a little strange. I mean, come on, what is a simple picture going to do that will teach me anything about writing? It’s the exact same image that I have been staring at for the last hour. When I wrote this reflection though, my whole view changed.

Composing in a digital age is very different from any time before. I know that I personally see my work as much more variable then I had before. Looking at just the image on the screen and having no control over what it looks like or what it says was really eye opening. With Microsoft Word, I can type a huge essay and print it out. Then if I feel that it needs to be changed I can just start the program up again and fix it. When that new and improved version is saved that original work is erased from the memory, and the new is left in its place. With actual physical writing or even typing on a type writer, any attempt to just go back and fix the original copy would have left a smudged and ugly mess. That plain physical caused any single draft to be unique. This really changed my view of digital composing.

In this digital age any type of composing can be quicker and much more variable. The author has access to so many different methods of communicating now then in the past. I think that an interesting way to better understand digital composing would be to do the exact same project as both a hard copy and a digital copy in a different medium. Talk about the exact same topic, maybe even use the same words but see what new and exciting thing you could do to change the digital copy.