You’ve probably learned your standard MLA or APA formatting when it comes to writing your papers, it’s something that we’ve learned to do in school. The size 12, Times New Roman font, with double spacing and the 1 inch margin. That’s what school taught as the proper professional way to write papers. But whats wrong with that? Well frankly, there’s a lot of things. While teachers tell you to use this as part of your final drafting, it just kinda makes your writing look awful. There’s always going to be ways to improve your writing, but it’s possible to also make it visually appealing.
But to keep in mind what makes your essay or story, or whatever you may be doing, what are we looking for when it comes to that? Looking to Melanie Gagich’s “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” We get to see a good idea of what modes are and how to use them properly.
What are Modes?
Gagich mentions that there are 5 modes to keep in mind while writing. The 5 modes mentioned are visual, linguistic, spatial, gestural, and aural. What do any of these mean? Why are they so important for us to keep a reminder on these?
The visual mode as simple as it is, is just what the audience can see. Like if you have an image or graph, anything that allows for interest for anyone that’s reading. This can also mean what font you use, what size the text is, what color you use, and so on. As long as the reader can see it, they will notice it.
Linguistics, as simply put, refers to the words that you use. When you’re writing a post online or trying to write an argumentative paper, you want to be mindful of the words you use. You don’t want to simplify things too much but you also don’t want to use words or phrases that your audience may not be familiar with. You have to be careful with how your write things.
The spatial mode refers to how you’re spacing your text. Like how you would use double space for a paper. Or how you just organize the text, or emphasize it. It’s like wanting to show off whats the more important part of your text and making sure they can see it.
The gestural mode can honestly be more reserved for something like presentation or speeches, but those are also a form of writing when you think about it. You’re still communicating through your papers so it’s the same with speeches. As the phrase implies, it’s referring to the movement and gestures that you do. If you’ve had a class like public speaking you know how important it is to limit your gestures, but if you talk with your hands, you have to figure out how to make it work too.
Finally the last mode is the aural. This refers to speech. How you talk. You have to sound like you know what you’re talking about. Make sure there aren’t a lot of pauses, that you sound confident, and try to emphasize what your points are. Without it, you can bore an audience and it won’t be as impactful and effective
Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Classroom
In the reading mentioned above, written by Michael J. Klein and Kristi L. Shackelford, they talk about how important it is to figure out your document design and formatting. What you learned in middle and high school, may not fly for some teachers once you’re in college. Some teachers might just tell you to forget all you learned about how to format and tell you a different way to do it. Or they might just let you do what you want.
But you have to know that these kind of things are very important to consider when looking into formatting. Maybe you made the font too small or used one that you can’t read all too well, or maybe you haven’t gotten to the main point of your paper and have been repeating yourself without end. When applying these kind of styles, you have to make sure that you know what looks good and what will give your readers an easier time when it comes to actually being able to digest the information given. It feels like rocket science but once you get the hang of it, it’s simpler as it seems and as time goes on, you can improve and learn how to better format your documents!
Leave a Reply