CREATIVE COMPOSITION

Post 110 - by Gautam Shah
.

 We express about things, ideas, dreams, experiences, concepts; to re-enact, record or communicate. The re-enaction helps to reinforce the experience of a happening, and recover the missing sets of information. Recording helps to organize and condense the information for posterity. Communication imparts information to someone or secures a reaction.

The focus of the re-enactment is what one strongly feels, desires, or believes, and with that entire experience enlivened, justified or confirmed. Events occur in spatial context and have time sequencing, but for re-enactment, it is the personal relevance that becomes the force-de-majeure. The links between spatial or temporal segments are not amenable to any logic and so remain ethereal.

The recording media (paper, tape, film) is an estate that must be used carefully. A record is created for its retrieval in some other time and space, by own-self or someone else and in part or as a whole. These, needs some order and frugality. So records are better organized then personalized enactments.

Communication occurs through writing, oral and gestural deliveries and through abstract medium of graphics. It is an expression for a target ‘audience’. The author must be proficient in the subject and have some knowledge about the target audience. The contents are sequenced, with time as the operative element. Oral or gestural deliveries are sequenced in time so are lineal. Writings can have non-lineal arrangement provided it is aided indexing. Graphical formats are impressionistic, rely on the holistic effect. 

Such spatial ordering is used to highlight or amplify certain sections as well as to demarcate sections. Other spatial formations are based on some value judgement system. Database management presentations use such value-based derivations. Spatial formations such as tables, matrices, etc. are used for data management in spreadsheets.

 Flaubert's heavily edited page of his manuscript for Un Cœur simple

Creative Compositions use many of these techniques:

● Time and Space ordering:

The contents are sequenced, with time as the operative element. The time is apparent in sequencing of events, time related measurable changes, accelerations and deceleration and for cause-effect presentations.

In speeches pause is an important time section for concepts to sink in, allow the audience to respond (clapping, thumping or noise to die down), or enhance the delivery of next expression. Audio-video presentations are synchronized to beats, or tempo-pitch of the delivery. Background noise and music are scaled to the nature of contents. 

● Emphasis by Condensation and Elaboration:

The emphasis in compositions occurs by condensation and occasionally by elaboration of the subject matter. Emphasis is often created by intentional de-emphasis. Obvious details, concepts, ideas, conclusions are not put forward at the nominal time and space, but are placed at the end, or the audience is allowed to draw its own inferences.

The condensation and elaboration are employed to colour a document as a personal style statement.

Condensation eliminates all unnecessary and less necessary contents, and thereby increase the clarity, reduce the expression size, delivery time, perception effort, etc. Condensation is also done by use of abbreviations and symbols that replace large units of contents. These include idioms, proverbs, metaphors, and signs. Condensation is often used to restrict the access to a specific class of audience, like magicians’ instructions.

Elaboration is achieved by augmenting the context of difficult to understand concepts, events, situations, or objects. It is also done by using the same word in different context, and using similar words (synonyms and antonyms from a thesaurus) to redefine the meaning. Multiple explanations help amplify content. Elaboration is achieved by inclusion of anecdotes, couplets, quotations, footnotes, end notes, and other sensorial effects.

● Bridging and Linking:

The contents are bridged to create a seamless statement or a larger concept. The most common bridging is through time and space organization of the contents. The links to other documents (e.g. hyper-links, bibliographies, index) are such reference bridges. Recorded contents are classified according to the nature of content, name of the author, date of publication, size and form of the document. Such classification identifiers also provide associations. A well bridged or cited content vouches its authenticity through circumstantial referencing. Contents are also bridged using conjunctions. Words like and, if, or, when, then, whereas, therefore, etc. connect clauses or sentences. Bullets, numbered lists, also bridge sub topics.

 

● Separating and Isolating:

The contents are separated or isolated, by spacing (white spaces, pauses, start of new paragraph, section or a chapter), and by tabulation (bullet marking, numbering, hyphenating, bracketing), to highlight or categorise the sub-topics. Separation in writing is achieved by commas, semicolons, brackets, or other interludes (gutter spaces in newspaper columns). In recordings a null space is provided for the machine to recognize the end of one section and the beginning of next one. By isolating the contents it becomes easier to link each such section distinctly.

● Abstraction:

The contents are abstracted by removing all less important information, time slots and space gaps. The expression language in Internet chat rooms shows the nature of abstraction spreading across the world. Common words are written by eliminating vowels and are denoted by their phonemes. Symbols and metaphors are also used to squeeze the contents. Vedic mantras represent knowledge in a very condensed form to easily remember it (‘Shrut Gyan’ -knowledge that is heard). However, such condensation allows for different interpretation of the contents.

● Marking

Contents are marked to enhance (bold facing, underlining, Italics, large size type faces) their presence. The contents are delivered louder, faster or slower, brighter, repeatedly, and in metres (musical, couplets with rhymes) for the same effect.

● Order of contents

An expression can begin as an inquiry into a seemingly un-ordered realm, and conclude with a definitive proposition. Other way round, the expression can state a hypothesis or belief, and proceed to present the evidence in support or against it. The third method is hybrid, as it starts by analyzing a happening with all the cause-effect contexts.

 ● Support from other media

Emphasis by support from other media is exploited to not only enhance the contents, but also its presentation. In writing and print media some of the topographical tools used are: underlining, bold printing, fonts' sizes, colours of font and background, font styles (plain, italics, small caps, with serif, sans serif, etc.) Other graphical tools include insertion of graphs, charts, illustrations, etc. within the document content. Multi media presentations have more than one format like static pictures, movies, 3D effects, animations, sound clips, body vibratory systems, ‘olfactory and taste’ supplement systems.

In oration a speaker boosts the delivery with body gestures, repetition of words or sentences, pitch variation of voice, use of rhymes, rhythmic, metre oration, poetical recitation, etc. The information gets registered easily when supported by visuals such as tables, charts and graphs, picture slides, movie or video clips, animation. Learning frames or interludes are subtly included to lodge the contents easily into the minds.

●  By Titling (Naming)

One of the best way of focussing (by declaration) the content is to provide a title to it. A title as created by the author is more truthful but is not accepted by the reader or audience, as their intentions of accessing need not match the author’s perceptions. Storage systems create own titles to facilitate access by their users’ needs. Titles have limitations of size. This is overcome by including long titles or list of keywords or summary or precis.

.