In her chapter, “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing”, Melanie Gagich provided me some of the much-needed assurance going into the upcoming Essay Remix assignment ahead, that all writing is multimodal and that I have already been utilizing multiple modes of communication semester-long even when I write essays, taking away some of the scary newness of it all; and that the same activities such as planning, drafting, and revising involved in the writing process are those involved when composing less traditional multimodal text, such as podcasts or social media posts. Gagich provides an expanded definition of the term “text” to “a piece of communication that can take many forms.” And with this new conception, some of the challenges to approaching the task of composing multimodal texts for a different genre and medium can be minimized.
Even when I think about writing an essay or blog post response, there are visual choices made through italics or headers. And spatial choices, as I select or omit words and sentences based on length just so that the arrangement of the paragraph and margins sit “right”. There are various modes I can see at play even in traditional forms. Understanding the five modes of communication (visual, linguistic, spatial, gestural, and aural) and how they can be used to shape and deliver meaning to audiences is an important piece of writing studies, especially in consideration of our extended view of texts, and the real ways we create and interact with them daily including in digital spaces, where alphabetic symbols are only one piece.
Despite the everyday interaction with various multimodalities of text, it seems foreign to create a piece from what was once an essay into something new, as with our task at hand. But because text is aimed at communicating, one of the best places to start as Gagich suggests is with the rhetorical situation, considering the message behind the text, the audience, author, genre, and medium, in the initial part of pre-drafting. Keeping in mind the exigence, purpose, reader and ethos as I would with any piece of writing, should still be at the forefront of transforming the text from essay-style writing to its new form, and will shape how the text develops, and how to convey it given its new modes of communication.
I think her advice to collect other pieces of texts and materials similar topically or in terms of genre to what I intend to compose is so important, because it serves as a model to analyze the rhetorical choices they make to convey their message, to place their audience and author, and their use of medium, and take that into my own work. Sometimes I find that the best insights for not just improving but developing and reconceiving my work come from the advice and observations made during peer review of others’ texts, and analyzing what others are doing well, or how they can move closer to what I believe they are trying to accomplish and then take that into my own work. Gagich suggests we analyze example texts and break down the elements of the rhetorical situation, so we can better develop and understand what we will do in our own.
Although I don’t particularly like creating outlines, I do believe there is a place for it, especially when taking the task of initiating composition for a new form, and when placed in terms of just answering the questions of the goals behind the composition and the rhetorical considerations surround it: What is my message? Who is my audience? Who am I as the author and where do I want to be seen? What genre does this text belong to? And what medium am using to convey my message? These are questions that belong to all writing and composition studies and provide a good source for bullet points in formulating an initial outline, before I go about drafting the actual writing and mapping out content.
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