Overview
In 2014, Hrishikesh Hirway started the podcast Song Exploder in which he asks musicians to take apart their songs, describing at times the origins of melodies, the meaning of lyrics, the instrumentation choices, and the recording process. He has now done over one hundred, covering everything from Game of Thrones to La La Land, artists from Metallica to Norah Jones. I’m sure you can find your favorite artist or at least an artist that you enjoy on the list. I want you to start this assignment by listening to an episode of Song Exploder.
For this assignment, I want you to take apart a piece of writing in the same way that musicians on Song Exploder take apart their songs. I’m calling this a deconstruction. It’s really more of an exploration, a rationalization, an observation, and primarily a commentary about the way you write and how you do it.
Just like Song Exploder, you are picking passages and moments from a single piece of writing to share insight about. Maybe a teacher told you that you were supposed to write the first sentence of a graf a particular way, so that’s why you wrote the sentence the way you did. Maybe you read a phrase in a book and you liked its syntax, so you copied the structure because it sounded cool. Maybe your boyfriend or girlfriend just lied to you about where they were at, and you found yourself ranting a bit about the meaning of truth in an essay on sustainability for an SI class.
You may be asking yourself, what does this look like? In the spirit of deconstruction, I will explain what it is not. It’s not an essay. It’s not a story. It’s not a single unified text. Instead, it is more akin to the director’s commentary on a Blu-ray or DVD. Recognize that it will be displayed on the web, so you can use web tools to show your commentary. For example, a link to a Google Doc that has your commentary inserted using the Comment feature. You could also create a Word doc with callout boxes that point to particular passages, then save it as a PDF for display on the web (the comment feature in Word might not display the full comment depending on the version you are using). You could also do a split table version in which the left column of the table is your text, and the right column is your commentary for select passages. The original work is placed at the forefront with your commentary in the margins.
Your task
Select one piece you have written at DU and provide commentary on passages and moments in the text that reveal your purposeful choices in writing the piece.
- Select a piece you are strongly considering for inclusion in the portfolio. It can be your Revision piece.
- Begin rereading the piece, making notes about the writing choices you made and why you made them.
- Decide how you want to best convey this to your audience. As a pure webtext, you might find it difficult, but it’s still possible. For example, you could insert bracketed [comments] in the middle or end of grafs to provide your commentary. You could do an audio commentary if you wanted, but that might require more time and effort than what it’s worth. You could do a split table design like as follows:
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. | I had seen this before, but I wasn’t sure of its purpose until Professor Colby in my WRIT 3500 pointed out that it is place holder text used in design. |
What would probably be the easiest would be to use Google Docs or Word and place callout boxes in the margins like the following:
If something doesn’t translate well to a pure webtext, think how it will look as a PDF.
Email the Deconstruction to richard.colby@du.edu by Wednesday, 11:59pm. You will NOT be posting this (or the Reflection) to the blog this week.