As I read “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in The Writing Classroom”, by Klein and Shackelford and “An Introduction To and Strategies for Multimodal Writing”, by Gagich I learned different ways to see my writing. Reading the first article, I realized just how accurate the phrase “a picture is worth 1000 words”, is. The first article by Klein and Shackelford spoke about how you might have to add pictures or a form of media to your writing in order to get the full image across. An example they used was in order to make an impact with an essay on oil spills, you could add a photo. It would make your essay that much more impactful.
This made me think of the time that I did a science fair project in the 8th grade. My group and I put together this prototype that would filter water from the lake and bring it clean into their homes. We chose a third world country and used pictures of that third world country that showed exactly what they go through. One of the judges had mentioned that the pictures we chose highlighted the issue we were speaking on. This article also brought to my attention just how important format is in your writing. If your essay well written, but not formatted properly it won’t look well put together.
In reading the second article, I realized how multimodal text wasn’t introduced to me until college. I have made powerpoint’s and collages of all sorts of things. In high school, they were very strict on being sure that we all knew how to write a 5 paragraph essay. It is quite funny to look back on now, because I have done more Powerpoint presentations than written actual essays.
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