Melanie Gagich’s chapter, “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” is beneficial when learning about multimodal composing. First, it’s important to understand why it is so important to learn about multimodal texts and it’s because everything that we do today is heavily based or represented through media and technology. It was interesting to me to learn that a “movie, meme, social media post, essay, website, podcast,” and many other things are considered multimodal texts (Gagich p. 66). Gagich mentioned that there are five different modes of communication, visual, linguistic, spatial, gestural, and aural, and these multimodal texts can be made up of multiple forms of communication at once and aren’t limited to one. Something very important to note is that knowing what rhetorical situation you are trying to convey will help to narrow down your texts. The message will show what the purpose of the text is for, the audience is who you are trying to get this message across to, the author seems simple enough but asks why exactly the person creating the text is relevant to speak on the topic, the genre to put it plainly is the overall vibe of the text (what emotion are you trying to convey), and the medium is the form of text decided to make like a video, meme, etc.
Michael J. Klein and Kristi L. Shackelford’s chapter, “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom” focuses on how you can actually make the final text look. They point out that having a picture in your document can speak more to people than words which I think is very prevalent in today’s world. People today have a very short attention span so if you don’t have something that will grab their attention immediately, you will not get much foot traffic on your text. The formatting of your text is also very important as you want things to look visually satisfying. Having a well-organized text will make things easier to read or look at so it’s good to keep in mind the aesthetics of the text matters. I think something important to note is keeping up with any trends or texts that are similar to what you want to put out is good to look at so you can get an idea of what does well and what doesn’t. Trends often change fast so keeping up with them and topics that are popular or on the rise can really benefit you and your work.
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