Multimodal

Multimodal is a description of the way a piece of media is made that says that the media is created using multiple modes. Modes are different ways and tools of creating, such as text and images. Stated by Kettering College, “A multimodal composition is one that uses more than one modality to achieve its intended purpose. The modalities are “visual, audio, gestural, spatial, or linguistic means of creating meaning” (Selfe, 195).” Some examples of multimodal texts are picture books, comics, web articles, and animated tv series.

Multimodal texts are highly effective in the classrooms as they keep the students attentive through different media. The University of Illinois lists the benefits of multimodality as “promoting more interactivity, portrays information in multiple ways, adds more creativity to present information and it adapts projects to fit different audiences.” Claire Lauer, a rhetorical theoretician, uses multimodal texts to create a project called “What’s in a Name” where she incorporates audio, visual and textual elements to create an interactive and flexible presentation.

Multimodal composition is the way in which today’s students, scholars, and artists create media using different modes and platforms. People use multimodal composition to create Youtube videos, podcasts, webpages, sports games, and books. The term has come up because of the birth of new technology and its variety of devices; because of these phenomena, people are forced to use different methods of creating to arrive at their final presentations. Throughout the course of history, people have used different modes of creating to make different texts. The ancient Sumerians used clay tablets to record things (Baron, 73).The ancient Greeks used papyrus parchment to create their texts. After, typewriters came, sound could be transmitted through radio, television arrived, and now people use computers at will. Today, these technologies combine each other in different ways when people create media. The technologies we use today force us to make everything multimodal if we are using computers, because the computers are multimodal tools themselves. Multimodal composition is a change of the process in which media is composed, because we now have a variety of tools to manipulate media. Multimodal media and how it is created today, allows us to distinguish between the different technologies that are used to create said media.

This is not limited to digital platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It can be a written note that includes magazine clippings and google pictures. This is a form of multimodal writing because it includes different forms of communication. Melanie Gagich talks about how these forms of writing can be achieved by talking about visuals, linguistics, gestures, aural and spatial which are modes of communication. Combining these modes can lead to forming a discourse that is multimodal (Gagich, 67). Multimodal composition can also allow for people to have a broader audience and prepare students for careers. Multimodal media is a product of the variety of tools that technology has gifted us today, and it makes media ever more powerful. As time progresses the mode of choice progresses as well, so as technology changes people will discover new ways to evolve forms of multimodal communication.