Before reading Melanie Gagich’s “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” I had never even heard of the word “ Multimodel”. However, after reading and analyzing this article it opened my eyes to a new concept of writing in English. Words, images even movies can be included in one piece because they are “texts”. If you had asked me what were “texts” before reading this article, I would have said texts are pieces of writing( essay, textbook, article, etc. ) However, if you were to ask me to know based on Gagich’s article,” texts” is any piece used as a form of communication specifically in the world of composition. Before this, the idea that even a movie would be considered a “text” was bizarre to me.
Mutimodeling can be seen as multitasking but just in writing format. But, in this case, multitasking is productive where the reader will be able to interpret the author’s idea from a visual, and written perspective. However multitasking is not a productive task the majority of the time. Instead, it does the opposite and costs the individual to achieve slower than if they had focused on one thing at a time. This concept is discussed in Danielle Lottridge et al’s “The Effects of Chronic Multitasking on Analytical Writing.” In this study, results show that students who text while writing an essay are more likely to perform worse than those who don’t text while writing an essay.
As a person who attempts to multitask chronically, I can attest that it does promote more distractions. It is better to focus on one thing at a time rather than multiple things at one time to improve productivity. In an academic setting, one example is when I was in elementary school, my sixth-grade teacher would always warn us not to write while she explained. For her she knew if we write while she spoke. Her brain was too young to understand while writing, but she needed to focus on the explanation first, then the use of writing as a reinforcement for the topic being discussed.
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