What you’ll learn to do: evaluate multimodal text

Writing in college goes well beyond traditional essays. We’ve looked at different modes of essays – compare and contrast, cause and effect, and others. In this section, we turn to a different kind of text: the multimodal text.

Even before the domination of social media, we all had to negotiate more than just words. We encounter and make meaning out of sounds, images, gestures, and the spaces in which those exist, on a daily basis. In our interconnected and internet enhanced world, the work of understanding, analyzing, composing, and communicating with multimodal texts is ubiquitous.

Whether you are tasked with giving an on-the-fly presentation about a report you wrote at work or you want to use social media to share your vacation photos with your grandparents across the country, you’re moving between and among different modes constantly.

In this section, we’ll discuss multimodal texts, how they work, how they are designed, and how to use them effectively to communicate in school and beyond.