What is an Essay? What is a Composition?

Here at Hofstra, we are constantly writing. We write long academic papers, short homework assignments, text messages, emails, journals, blogs, facebook comments and tweets. Are all of these writings the same? Of course not, academic papers are long, tedious and structured, while text messages are fast, messy and full of abbreviations such as "brb" and "lol". However all forms of writing, I believe, have one commonality: they are compositions. When I first began investigating what a composition was, and how it differs from an essay, I turned to Webster's Dictionary for a definition. The dictionary listed seven different possible definitions for the term, and left me with the impression that it is not concrete; a composition is an abstract idea that composers use to define their creations. Therefore, I expanded my thinking to not only how compositions and essays differ, but how they relate to one another.

Essays are scary. Everyday, students pray that the word doesn't escape their professor's lips, for they know what is in store for them once the essay is issued: endless researching and procrastinating, followed by writer's block and attempts to drag out a boring subject to fulfill a five page quota. However, if you were to take any of these students phones and accumulate all of the text messgaes they sent over the past day, there is a high probability there would be enough text to fill 5 pages. And yet, this form of writing comes so easy, so what is it about essays that cause such hardship? There are several reasons, primarily the structure of the writing. With an academic paper, there is little room for creativity and imagination. Your task is to write five pages about a subject that , most of the time, has little to no interest to you. Furthermore, you are also bound by guidelines. Perhaps you are writing an essay on the Swine Flu Pandemic and have to discuss the ways the virus infiltrates and affects the human body. However, as a Public Relations major, you are far more interested on the affect of the Swine Flu on our daily lives, such as school closings and other preventative measure that have been taken. Unfortunately, you are bound by the guidelines of your professor and cannot write about an aspect of your topic that truly interests and engages you. Therefore, the biggest problem with essays is that you are not the authority. Essays oppress students' free will to write about what they truly desire. And as we have learned throughout history, people to not enjoy being oppressed. We like to be free to do, feel, and write, as we please. The rigid structure and oppressive nature of essays not only makes writing them more difficult, but on some level creates a resentful attitude towards essay writing that is not found in compositions.

A composition is any creation that is assembled by seperate parts to create one complete piece of work. It is also free of form and medium. Unlike an essay, a composition, has less guidelines, leaving the composer free to create something original and satisfying. There is no dictator in composing; you are the authority; you decide when, what, and how you will compose. Additionally, compositions are not constrained to paper and pen. A composition can be a film, a piece of music, a poem, a play, or even an epic novel. There is no limits to the possibilities of compositions. However, having total authority also gives you total responsibility. In an essay, there is structure and you know that you have completed the task when you have reached the assigned guidelines. However, in a composition, you are only bound by the limits you set for yourself. While this may be freeing for some, it may also put pressure on those who are accustomed to relying on others to tell them how to complete an assignment.

While comparing the differences between essays and compositions I realized that, based off my definition, an essay is simply a form of a composition. Each individual letter, makes up words, which make up sentences, which make up paragraphs which makes up the essay. Therefore, every-time a teacher asks for an essay, they are also asking for a composition. Unfortunately for the students, the essay is probably the most rigidly structured and least creative of all of the forms of composition, however it is a composition all the same.

What Do You Write? Why Do You Write What You Do?

When started to think about what I write, the first things that came to my head were academic writings, such as essays, lab reports, and the like. However, when I really started to think about it, I use writing much more than I realized in my personal life. Rarely do I ever put my pen to paper outside of the classroom, but I compose an enormous amount of digital writing. I first discovered this when looking at my iPhone. Now there may be people out there who do not consider texting a form of writing, but those people have simply never had an iPhone. The phone organizes all of your text messages with each individual person into one seamless flow of dialogue. Furthermore, there is no limit to the amount of texts that can be stored in this seamless flow, allowing a endless narrative of events between two people. The same is also true for Facebook status updates and tweets on Twitter. Individually they are just short blurbs about one's life and experiences. But cumulatively they are a digital autobiography of notable moments or events in one's life.

Alphabetization And Its Discontents

Today, alphabetization is so strongly embedded into our lives that we cannot even imagine grouping things in any other way. However, it wasn't until Weinberger pointed it out, that I realized how unimportant alphabetizing objects really is. As Weinberger asserts, "it tells us exactly nothing about the real relationships among the parts". His point is so true. Soda and soap are relatively similar in spelling, but that link only gives superficial information about the two, there is no physical relationship. Furthermore our society has become overwhelmingly politically correct, something I am not proud of, and would cause a social uproar if we used any method other than alphabetization for classifying things.

Alphabetization is blind to social contraptions, and in a world where equality is everything, blind is paramount. "On a field trip", Weinberger writes, "no one gets upset when students are told that A through M go on Bus No. 1 and the N-Zs go on Bus No. 2, but it would be front page news if students were divided by race, prettiness, or their parents' incomes". This is the reason alphabetization is so loved, it prevents discrimination. In a sense, grouping ourselves in such ways brings us back to the separate but equal notion that was defeated decades ago by Civil Rights activists. When looked at in that light, alphabetization becomes more than just a manner of grouping, it becomes a protector of our civil liberties and rights to equality.

The New Order Of Order

As a species, human beings love organization. But as technology progresses, how are we changing the way we group and label information? Is the digital world helping us achieve the organizational utopia which we've always longed for, or is it making us more miscellaneous than ever? That is the central question that David Weinberger grapples in Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. In order to understand how the digital age is changing the way we store information, we must first explore and understand what Weinberger terms "the orders of order".

The first order of order is the actual organization of matter. We store our books on the book shelf while our groceries are kept in the refrigerator. In this order, there is little room for the miscellaneous. Every item is limited to one location, forcing categorization. Personally, I am very disorganized, especially when it comes to CDs and DVDs. Whenever my mom would come into my room, she would yell at me to take better care of my movies so that they don't get lost and I know where to find them. I tried to explain, to no avail, that my DVDs we're completely organized, just in a structure that was specific to me. The video games go in a pile next to the Xbox and the DVDs go in a stack underneath the DVD player. The first order of order is utilized by all individuals, regardless of how organized a person is or isn't. One person's mess is another's constructively organized chaos.

However, as the quantity of organized items increase, the retrieval process becomes tedious and painful. In comes the second order of order: the card catalog. The card catalog has both its pros and cons. It is beneficial in providing important information about the queried item. However, a large catalog can take time to flip through, and furthermore, the physical limitations of the card hinder the amount of information that can be printed.

"The problems with the first two orders of order", Weinberger notes, is "that they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work". However, the third order of order does not have to abide by these laws. Once a picture or an item is brought into the digital world, it can be put into an infinite quantity of folders and be labeled in any way imaginable. While this creates countless benefits for information seekers, it also creates a miscellaneous order that allows countless combinations of organization.

I believe the most astounding aspect of this miscellaneous order is what Weinberger declares at the end of the chapter. "The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and-perhaps more important-who we think has the authority to tell us so". I think this is a very powerful notion because it asserts that the common people have a strong influence on matters that we're once out of their control.