What you’ll learn to do: evaluate multimodal text

College writing extends beyond essays. So far, we’ve explored different essay types like compare-and-contrast and cause-and-effect. Now, we’ll shift to a different kind of communication: multimodal texts.

Even before social media, we engaged with more than just words—interpreting sounds, images, gestures, and spatial elements in daily life. In today’s digital world, understanding, analyzing, and creating multimodal texts is essential.

Whether you’re presenting a report at work or sharing vacation photos with family online, you constantly navigate different modes of communication. In this section, we’ll explore what multimodal texts are, how they work, and how to use them effectively in both academic and real-world contexts.