Reinventing Writing through Multimodality

Anna Wintour, editorial director of Condé Nast and editor-and-chief of Vogue US, selects texts to appear in the acclaimed September Issue, 2009

I found the concept of interactive textbooks to be very interesting, especially the sections on William Sparke and Clark McKowen’s text Montage: Investigations in Language and Ray Kylte’s Comp Box: A Writing Workshop Approach to Composition. In some ways I think the modern equivalent would be the rise of the e-textbook in secondary and collegiate universities. However, e-textbooks, as interactive as they try to be through audio links and videos, do not enable to students to manipulate the general format beyond annotations. In comparison, the Comp Box: A Writing Workshop Approach to Composition “...offers students a box of unbound photocopied materials as well as an author’s guide that explains ways that students might draw upon the materials (cutting, pasting, rearranging, adding, deleting) to make their own texts (Palmeri 103). I found that this approach to writing is incredibly innovative because it encourages students’ understanding of revision that exists beyond alphabetic texts. Kytle proves that his main focus for the textbook was to promote studens’ critical thinking on purpose and design when he instructed the publisher to randomize the pages with the kit so that no Comp Boxreplicated the other. By teaching students elements of alphabetic text making and visual/auditory design, teachers “...heighten students’ critical awareness of the ways that media texts construct reality” (105). This, I believe is the most important part of teaching are students technological literacy – both in analyzing and develop.

Despite disagreeing with the assertion that “...shifts in communication technologies are causing a disconnect between the composition classroom and the literacy practices of students,” I understand how this may have been true at the time the claim was made (87). Rather, I feel that educators are more cognizant of the need to combine students’ experience inside and outside of school into one holistic understanding. In my experience, teachers include a variety of multimodal teaching strategies across many disciplines. In the English classroom, specifically, I have observed the creation of personal blogs, infographics, magazine designs in the form of classwork and literary magazines, and writing portfolios. However, I do thinking that multimodal projects present educators with a specific challenge in terms of evaluation. While alphabetic writing is the main portion of a multimodal project that English teaches may tend to focus on, this section of the project should not taking away from the visual, aural, and spatial design choices. Harvey S. Weiner explores the challenge English teachers face with evaluating multimodal assessments, specifically the lack of experience “correcting or grading multimedia texts.” He writes,

“Our responses are essentially emotional: although we would surly correct a dangling modifier or a misspelled word...there is not much in visual presentation that we would know hot to grade or correct. Committed so to words, we are much less rigid in our responses to non-verbal impression offered by students” (96).

Because of this, we may have a tendency to provide less support and constructive criticism on visual and auditory design elements.

The main themes that I got from this chapter is the importance in promoting critically thinking alongside choice in multimodal projects – as seen in the creation of different styles of multimodal writing textbooks, and the need for teachers to examine their methods for analyzing and evaluating student’s work. Through studies, we know that students are more inspired and hardworking when they are assigned a multimodal project as compared to a traditional analytical essay. However, teachers need to increase their own understanding of the various design choices that go into creating multimodal texts and projects in order to

evaluate pieces fairly and holistically.