What is multimodality?
Multimodality is the use of multiple modes to make and communicate meaning. These modes migh be written, oral, digital/technological, kinetic, or visual. Composing multimodally requires an awareness of the relationships between modes and discipline, audience, purpose, and circulation. In a writing classroom, multimodal composition can provide students with the opportunity to think through affordances of different modes and methods of communication to best suit their purposes.
Why is multimodal composition pedagogy important?
Providing students with opportunities to compose multimodally can help students engage more deeply with their composition process and the classroom content. Developing awareness of different affordances for different modes can help facilitate considerations for audience, discourse communities, and genre that strengthen a text.
Additionally, familiarity with multimodal composition tools can help students develop new media literacy and skills to interpret and analyze the barrage of video, image, and audio media of today’s communciation world. Priveleging traditional, essayistic writing can close off composition opportunites that multimodality welcomes.
How can you incorporate more multimodality into your class?
Below are strategies and tools for incorporating multimodality into your writing classroom.
A Way In: Framing Multimodal Composition for Readers and Writers
Below are three ways to frame multimodality in your classroom to provide students — as both readers and writers — a way into thinking about communicating with multimodality. The questions below can be used to prompt an in-class discussion or process work assignment as students analyze and discuss a multimodal text as readers, or, to support their writing process as they compuse multimodally. Additonally, these frames can be useful when adapting existing writing assignments to multimodal assignments.
Sensorial/Embodied Frame
Encourage students to think about the ways that the body is involved in communication and writing and how our bodies as readers and writers exist within a social and cultural context. One way to do this is to think about the sensorial experience of both composing and reading. This frame pairs well with feminist perspectives (see Susan Delagrange) and disability perspectives (see Jay Dolmage).
Questionts to Prompt an Embodied Awareness:
- What senses are invoked by the text? Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and/or touch? How do these senses impact the experience of interacting wiht this text? Is there significance to the senses that are not being invoked? How does this impact the text’s message?
- What senses do you want to invoke with your multimodal composition? Why do you choose these senses? How are they significant to your message and purpose?
- Is this text accessible? Does multimodality increase or decrease access in this case?
- What are the material consequences for this text?
- How does the sensorial experience of particular modes influence your decision to use/not use them?
Form/Content Frame
When making decisions about different communication modes, it can be helpful for writers to think about the relationship between form and content. Certain purposes and arguments warrant different forms and modes for effective communicaiton.
Questionts to Prompt Thinking about the Relationship between Form and Content:
- How is this author’s content related to the text’s form? Do they support each other? Why do you think the writer chose this form for this message? What affordances do the chosen modes add to the author’s argument?
- When thinking about the content of your paper, what forms do you think will serve it best? Or, perhaps, you have a particular form in mind for a particular audience, but are still developing your purpose and content. How does working your chosen form with the available modes inspire ideas about the content, purpose, and argument of your composition?
- Is it possible to separate form from content? Why or why not?
- How would different forms change the meaning of your composition?
Circulation Frame
Oftentimes, when working with multimodality, we are working in digital contexts with networked circulation capacities. Thinking about how we want our text to circulate and to what audiences can help composers develop sophisticated rhetorical awareness. This circulation is always contextual and thinking through the networked consequences of such circulation can help writers make decisions about which modes to compose with.
Questionts to Prompt Thinking about the Circulation of Texts and Ideas:
- How do you want your reader to access your text? What will be their process of discovering your message?
- How did you discover this multimodal text? How many clicks and different platforms did you pass through to get to it? How does that impact your understanding of the text and its context?
- Who is your ideal audience? What modes do members in that audience’s discourse community typically use? What platforms and publications should you use to increase access to your text?
- What are the material consequences of this circulation?
- What does the path of circulation tell us about this text?
Assessing Multimodality
Assessment communicates what we value as writing instructors and helps provide clear expectations for students. When assigning multimodal composition, be sure to incorporate multimodality into your rubrics. Below is some sample rubric language you might consider adapting to your particular multimodal composition assignment. This rubric was for a research paper that incorporated written communicaiton, plus at least one additional mode and presents as a useful example for adapting an existing assignment to incorporate multimodality.
| Category |
Excellent |
Good |
Competent |
Needs Improvement |
| Multimodality |
The project skillfully employs the affordances of written communication and at least one other mode (visual, aural, spatial, or gestural) to convey the message and achieve its purpose. Relationships between different modes artfully support other choices in teh project |
The project appropriately employs the affordances of written communication and at least one other mode (visual, aural, spatial, or gestural) to convey the message and achieve its purpose. Relationships between different modes clearly support other choices in the project. |
The project adequately employs the affordances of written communication and at least one other mode (visual, aural, spatial, or gestural) to convey the message and achieve its purpose, though some redundant “mode matching” may appear. Relationships between different modes vaguely or incompletely support other choices in the project. |
The project fails to effectively employ the affordances of written communication and at least one other mode (visual, aural, spatial, or gestural) to convey the message and achieve its purpose. The text relies on redundant “mode matching” or rhetorically irrelevant modes. Relationships between different modes fail to support other choices in the project. |
For more ideas about multimodal composition assignments in different disciplines, check out our Communication Spotlight!
Further Reading
Alexander, Jonathan and Jacqueline Rhodes. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies. CCCC/NCTE, 2014.
Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. NCTE, 2007.
Banks, Adam J. Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.
Delagrange, Susan. Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World. Utah State University Press, 2011.
Gerdes, Kendall, Melissa Beal, and Sean Cain. “Writing a Videogame: Rhetoric, Revision, and Reflection.” Prompt, vol. 4, no. 2, 2020, pp. 3-12.
Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing. (2012)