Christopher Farris

Writing is and has always been a multimodal practice in support of meaning making.

The six design elements of meaning making proposed by the New London Group are: (Sabatino)

1. Linguisitic meaning – the focus on delivery, vocabulary, position, word choice, information structures, and the overall organizational properties of the text. (Sabatino) This is the mode traditionally associated with pure text.

2. Visual meaning – associated with colors, images, font, page layout, perspective, screen formats. (Sabatino) This should be associated with texts as the layout of the page, the fonts and text colors used, the application of highlights and the thoughts or arguments given preference through strategic placement on the page. These guide the reader in their approach to the text. See a textbook, magazine, journal, work study or indeed almost any printed text for examples. Typical visual elements appear much like the example page below, taken from “Fracturing Writing Spaces: Multimodal Storytelling Ignites Process Writing.” (Lenters and Winters) Note the blue, italicized text calling out an important thought, the bolded section headers guiding the reader through the work and the image on the bottom left, rendered to look like a tear-out ruled paper that attempts to direct the student’s critical thinking process.

3. Audio meaning – referring to noise, music or sound effects. (Sabatino) Though sound is not inherent in a traditional text, it can be argued that, since texts are composed of words that are verbalized, are conceived in the brain as verbal sounds and are often read aloud, whether in an academic or personal context, via podcasts, audio books, web streaming services such as YouTube, or a variety of other ways, texts are intensely audiological in intent and in realization. (Palmeri)

4. Gestural meaning – relating to body language, behavior and sensuality. (Sabatino)

5. Spatial meaning – the arrangement of elements, physical structure, architectural design. (Sabatino) The heft of a book, the number of pages, the weight of the individual sheets and the texture of the page all carry clues to the substance of the text and where the reader or student stands in their completion of the document.

6. Multimodal – the interrelationship of all these modes.

Though multimodality is often associated with modern technologies such as web sites, presentation software, streaming videos, etc., Jason Palmeri argues that writing has always been multimodal. (Palmeri) The three aspects are:

1. Creativity If writing is supposed to be a meaning making activity, if it seeks to convey structured stories to the reader, has pedagogical intentions, intends to express chains of circumstances over time, or to engage the readers’ perceptions and to find a common ground of understanding, or even to shift the perceivers’ understanding, then writing as a technology shares purposes with other artistic endeavors such as painting, drama, and music. Seeking greater understanding of other artistic processes will assist the writer in their own endeavors. (Emig)

2. Translation Human understanding is multimodal. We comprehend the world around us using all of our senses and, having done so, store those sense pictures as memories for later consumption and external representation (i.e. tale telling.) Writing is the act of translating multimodal memory nodes into linear textual representations (often misrepresented as monomodal.) (Flower and Hayes)

3. Imagination Anne Berthoff quoting Rudolph Arnheim’s list of the operations involved in perception: “selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem-solving, as well as combining, separating, putting in context,” proposes that this list makes an excellent course in writing and that to think of perception as visual thinking makes the case that observation in the composition classroom displays the mind in action.” Palmeri goes further, using Berthoff’s statement to push for the furthering of multimodality in writing in order to fully express our multimodal perceptions and memories. (Palmeri)

As the mind perceives and stores experience in a multimodal fashion, and as traditional writing, though containing some multimodal structures, does not embrace all of the sensory communication methods available, and since there has been an explosion of easy to access methods of writing/creating in new technologies, the embracement of multimodal writing/creating both expands the comprehension capabilities of the audience and broadens the ability to engage the student/writer. (Mahon) Additionally, while students often find the act of writing distasteful and/or shameful because of an innate dislike for the task, or due to some previous shaming action on the part of a teacher or simply due to their talents lying elsewhere on the artistic or technical spectrum (e.g. drawing or web design), the inclusion of multimodal approaches often increases engagement in the learning process. (Using Multimodal Writing to Motivate Struggling Students to Write - ProQuest)

There are a number of online journals encouraging and supporting the use of multimodal approaches to traditional writing. Here are some examples (there are many more): • Kairos – A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy • Harlot - An interactive digital magazine dedicated to exploring rhetoric in everyday life • Babyteeth – An online indie publisher and press.

Emig, Janet A. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. National Council of Teachers of English, 1971. Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 1, National Council of Teachers of English, 1980, pp. 21–32. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/356630.

Lenters, Kimberly, and Kari-Lynn Winters. “FRACTURING WRITING SPACES: Multimodal Storytelling Ignites Process Writing.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 67, no. 3, [Wiley, International Literacy Association], 2013, pp. 227–37. Mahon, Wade, editor. “Multimodal Composition and the Rhetoric of Teaching: A Conversation with Cheryl Ball.” Issues in Writing; Stevens Point, vol. 18, no. 2, University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, 2010, pp. 111–31.

Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uark-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1979892. Sabatino, Lindsay A. “INTRODUCTION:: Design Theory and Multimodal Consulting.” Multimodal Composing, edited by LINDSAY A. SABATINO and BRIAN FALLON, University Press of Colorado, 2019, pp. 3–22. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvg8p6gt.4.

Using Multimodal Writing to Motivate Struggling Students to Write - ProQuest. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1726346490?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=8361. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.