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Since the early 2000s, writing scholars have been researching multimodality and its relationship to literacy.
Since the early 2000s, writing scholars have been researching multimodality and its relationship to literacy.
These selected texts--many of which are themselves multimodal--help us understand how and why multimodal texts can be so powerful. How do writers use multiple modes like image, alphabetic text (writing), sound, gesture, space, and movement to make meaning? Beyond simply defining multimodality, these texts explore how the prevalence of multimodal texts in our lives has changed our literacy practices in profound ways.
These selected texts--many of which are themselves multimodal--help us understand how and why multimodal texts can be so powerful. How do writers use multiple modes like image, alphabetic text (writing), sound, gesture, space, and movement to make meaning? Beyond simply defining multimodality, these texts explore how the prevalence of multimodal texts in our lives has changed our literacy practices in profound ways.
by The Guardian editorial staff (photo essay)
This multimodal essay combines poignant photos from Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests alongside interviews with four black photographers. As Flo Ngala notes, "Images are like languages," and photographs contribute to the story of major historical events.
In this textbook chapter, Diab explores how multimodal composition, in the form of documentary filmmaking, social media use, and web design, can be a way for writers to create social change in a digital world.
ABSTRACT: "This essay demonstrates how comics produced by and for queers become a site of multimodal queer rhetoric, a rhetoric that disrupts and remakes (hetero)normative discourses through combining multiple modes of meaning making."
by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (comic)
This excerpt from the March graphic novel series (book one) was published on The Appendix. In these panels, Congressional Representative and Civil Rights icon John Lewis describes applying to an all-white college and seeking help from Martin Luther King, Jr. when his application is ignored.
by Ben Harley (pdf and mp3)
In this sound essay, Harley explores the ways sound has become part of writing studies as well as how sound is the most "intimate" mode of communication. Try listening to the sonic essay first, then reading the transcript. How is the "reading" experience different?
by Ta-Nehisi Coates (hyperlink)
What's it like to go from writing books and essays to writing comics? In this short piece, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how he ventured outside his comfort zone to craft the story for The Return of the Black Panther.
(BONUS: Watch this video of Coates talking about his process on YouTube!)
by Scott Lunsford (video file and pdf transcript)
Children are experts in multimodal communication. In this video text, Lunsford explores how his daughter uses "unsanctioned surfaces," namely the walls in his house, to practice this emerging form of literacy.
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