• Multimodal Communication = WOVEN Communication
• Metacognitive Questions to Leverage Your Knowledge: Rhetoric, Process, & Multimodality

Have you ever composed an email or text message, especially one including pictures, emojis, or colored text? Given a presentation with visual aids? Created an advertisement to sell your used products or find a roommate? Used Zoom to communicate with friends, family, or professional acquaintances, wildly gesturing to them with your hands or sharing your screen so you can talk them through a document? Created a YouTube video? If you have done any of these things, you have been practicing multimodal communication. Nearly all of our communication tasks, whether they are academic, professional, or personal, engage more than one mode of communication at a time. Even seemingly simple written notes engage the visual mode by using the white space, headings, lists, and bullets to help your reader make sense of your text. Choosing among boldface, italicized, or standard font styles when you compose using word-processing software is another subtle way of engaging multiple modes as you communicate. Your English 1101 and English 1102 courses teach you to move beyond accidental multimodality, adopting strategies that deliberately use several modes together to create accessible, usable, and engaging artifacts for your audience.

To answer the question “How can I use multimodal communication?” you must first know what is involved in multimodal communication and why we use the WOVEN approach at Georgia Tech. Some colleges and universities have writing programs that focus largely on form and correctness in academic essay writing. However, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program focuses on rhetoric, process, and multimodality. Why? Developing your awareness of these three concepts makes you a better communicator, a more sophisticated innovator, and a more focused decision maker who can tackle any task. You will learn much more about rhetoric, process, and multimodality in the following chapters.

Rhetoric. Rhetoric—a discipline going back to Ancient Greece—is the study of the ways that people make what they write, say, or design persuasive for a particular audience in a particular situation. You need to learn about ways you can use rhetorical elements to influence your creation and interpretation of written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. Let’s look at the movie poster for Persepolis, shown above. Persepolis, an autobiographical novel told in comic strips, tells and shows the story of Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age experiences during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The novel explores the tensions between public and private life, among family members, and among individual and spiritual, religious, and political lives. The film adaptation of Persepolis was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2007. What questions about rhetorical elements might you consider when analyzing the Persepolis poster? Here are some questions you might ask—though they are only a few of the possibilities:

Rhetorical elements. Consider these rhetorical elements when communicating: content, context, purpose, audience, argument, evidence, genre, organization, visuals, design, and conventions.

Context: This graphic novel and movie have a huge international audience. Look at the words on the movie poster reproduced in this book: “A triumph. Feisty and funny. Wonderful.” Conduct an online image search for <Persepolis poster>. What do you observe about the language on other versions of the poster? What do you believe accounts for the differences among the posters?

• Audience: Are viewers’ perceptions of the poster art likely to change if they know the movie is based on a graphic novel? Graphic novels have a mixed audience—young adults and adults. How does the poster appeal to both audiences?
• Design: What do you think accounts for the fact that the main character in this version of the movie poster is not smoking, when the main character is smoking in some other versions of the poster?
• Conventions: Language and design conventions of movie posters include the name of the movie, text to attract viewers, text about actors, and the release date. What other conventions do movie posters—and other promotional posters—use? What movie poster conventions are used in the Persepolis poster shown here? What design features enable you to identify the conventions, even when a promotional poster is presented in a language other than English?

Process You need to develop your own effective and efficient processes for researching, collaborating, planning, drafting, reviewing, editing, revising, proofreading, and publishing—processes that work for you in various communication situations. You also need to reflect about your processes, so you can determine when they’re working and when they need to be fine-tuned. When you’re not happy with the way a project turns out, you need to know what processes led to the poor result, so you can change them. Likewise, when you do something well, you need to know what processes led to the positive result, so you can repeat them.

Return for a moment to the Persepolis example. You can use this movie poster to prompt additional thinking about process: What changes are needed to transform a graphic novel into a movie? What processes do you think the graphic designer used to create the movie poster? What processes may the designer have used to adapt the poster to different audiences and contexts?

Multimodality. Multimodal communication is at the heart of the ways you communicate in every part of your life. In your academic, community, and professional work, you need to be much more than a capable writer. You are also expected to be a capable speaker, designer, and collaborator—that is, you are expected to be proficient in communication in written, oral, visual, and nonverbal modes. Multimodality is widely used in universities, communities, and workplaces. Minimally, you need to be competent in these areas. Ideally, you should be extraordinarily proficient. Capabilities you should develop include following language and design conventions (grammar and mechanics) that influence both cultural expectations and audience comprehension (see Chapter 8 for discussions about considering assumptions, audience, and access as well as language and dialects). You also need to realize that simply complying with conventions is not enough. You do not want your work to be shallow and superficial, unworthy of you intellectually. Instead, you need to present strong arguments and consider the context, purpose, and audience of your work so that it will have meaning and depth, be intellectually rigorous, be respectful of your audience, and reflect the rhetorical demands of the situation.

Return to the Persepolis example and think about connections to multimodality. Consider the “affordances” of various modes and media to convey the story: What other modes could be used to convey the autobiography of the main character? The graphic novel Persepolis has already been transformed into an animated movie, but what would have been done differently if it had been made into an audiobook or into a live-action movie? How might you transform a segment of Persepolis into a podcast, an illustrated children’s book, or a documentary about girls growing up in Iran?

Affordances are properties of objects, tools, or environments that allow them to be used in particular ways. In multimodal communication, each mode has its own set of affordances. See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion.

Considerations in using this textbook. In the following chapters, you will learn vocabulary that will help you understand and discuss rhetoric, process, and multimodality and create smart, credible arguments. It will give you a way to articulate and to reflect on your practices as a communicator, both of which are key strategies for success in English 1101 and English 1102.

WOVENText approaches rhetoric, process, and multimodality in two major ways: by (1) discussing genre and (2) discussing processes for creating multimodal projects.

First, WOVENText discusses multimodality by exploring various genres and the ways artifacts from those genres are shaped by their rhetorical situation (purpose, audience, rhetorical appeals) and their genre conventions (style, design, sources). The book illustrates ways modes can work together within an artifact and the ways different genres engage different media. In addition, the material from Georgia Tech faculty members shows you how to weave modes together—to use them synergistically.

Select an artifact in one mode (e.g., written, oral, visual, nonverbal) and in one medium (print, digital) that you’ve created successfully in another course or situation. Identify a way to transform it into another mode or medium. #Remember #Analyze

Genre is a useful system of categorization to help you think about composition, but at Georgia Tech you are then encouraged to translate, transform, and transfer what you learn about each genre into broader strategies for use in other communication tasks (see Chapter 4). You can use genre categories as guides rather than strict rules. Pay attention to the ways effective communicators uphold and transgress the boundaries of particular genres and the ways they use WOVEN modes to influence what a genre can do.

Second, WOVENText offers a practical approach to creating multimodal projects. The terminology helps you articulate ways in which design and multimodality influence the questions about rhetorical situations posed throughout the text. The following chapters refer to linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural modes, drawing attention to the sensory experience of each mode. You can connect these sensory descriptions to written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. For example, the linguistic mode includes written, oral, and visual communication by focusing on word choice, delivery, organization, and coherence of ideas. The visual mode intersects with written, visual, and electronic communication, helping viewers focus on design. The aural mode intersects with oral and electronic communication, emphasizing sound and sound manipulation. The spatial mode intersects with visual communication, emphasizing arrangement, organization, and proximity. The gestural mode intersects with nonverbal communication, primarily concerned with how the movement of the body conveys meaning. You may have noticed that modes are referred to differently in this paragraph; regardless of the vocabulary, you will still be required to think about the process of multimodal design.

Source: Cheryl E. Ball, Jennifer Sheppard, and Kristin L. Arola, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects.

Metacognitive Questions to Leverage Your Knowledge: Rhetoric, Process, & Multimodality

You can start to answer the following direct and indirect metacognitive questions now, but you’ll have much more detailed and credible responses when you finish reading all the chapters.

• REMEMBER: Decide which rhetorical strategies you most wish to strengthen during this semester. #Remember
  
• UNDERSTAND: Explain your current processes—in collaborating, planning, drafting, reviewing, editing, revising, proofreading, and publishing. What kinds of changes would improve them? #Understand
  
• APPLY: Select an artifact (such as a graphic novel, movie poster, fairy tale, painting, poem, play, short story, or documentary film). Identify at least three other genres into which it might be transformed—as with the example of Persepolis in the preceding discussion. What additional genres are feasible and have likely audiences? #Apply
  
• ANALYZE: Examine the Georgia Tech homepage. Infer the major audiences for the site based on the content and design of the page. #Analyze
  
• EVALUATE: Compare a story from the Technique (the Georgia Tech student newspaper) with an article from a national or international news outlet. How do they differ in their use of rhetoric and modes of communication? #Evaluate
  
• CREATE: Select a short story or article that you have read for a class. Create a sketch of a promotional poster (with all the elements of such a poster) that informs viewers about the story or article’s purpose. How can you persuade them that it is worth reading? #Create