This chapter was contributed by Dr. Rebecca E. Burnett, former Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech, and Dr. L. Andrew Cooper, former Assistant Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech.

• What Is Communication?
• What Is Multimodal Synergy?
• What Are Examples of Multimodality?
• Why Focus So Much on Modes Other than Writing?
• How Does Multimodal Synergy Relate to Expectations for Students?
• How Does Multimodal Synergy Enhance Intellectual Development?
• Why Are Self-Reflection & Self-Assessment about Communication Processes & Artifacts Important?

Let’s get directly to the point: Can you be successful in academic, professional, personal, and community contexts without multimodal competence? No. Few questions about communication have black-and-white, either/or answers, but this one comes close. Academic courses, internships, and jobs are as dependent on your ability to give oral presentations, to work collaboratively, and to design effective visuals as on your ability to write reports. Personal, professional, and community relationships are as dependent on respectful nonverbal communication as on coherent conversation.

To be a successful multimodal communicator, you need to be able to understand the features and power of each mode separately and also be able to create, analyze, and interpret them synergistically. You need to be actively engaged as a communicator, not only working to master multimodal strategies that enable you to be effective but also understanding that in practice these strategies aren’t separable; they’re synergistic.

Consider the modes of WOVEN communication. Which are your strengths?
Which do you need to improve? Which do you prefer? Which do you avoid?
#Remember
#Understand

Synergy refers to objects or actions that work together. Simply put, synergy is what results when things interact and explains why the power of the whole is greater than the sum of its separate parts. You should think of effective communication as being synergistic—involving the interaction of written, oral, visual, and nonverbal modes. For example, written communication involves both a productive part (writing) and a receptive part (reading). Writing can be individual or collaborative and can be produced in a print or an electronic document. In the process of writing, writers talk both to themselves and to others, often sketch ideas in preparation for writing, use design elements to influence audience response (from headings and paragraphs to font choices and illustrations), and are affected by the environment in which they work. This short list of some of the synergistic aspects of writing shows that modes don’t exist in isolation. Your academic, professional, personal, and community success depends in large part on your competence with all the modes and your recognition that they function synergistically. As a capable communicator, your communication will be multimodal—that is, WOVEN.

As you advance academically at Georgia Tech and later assume professional roles, communication will become increasingly challenging. Professionals in all fields—ranging from architecture to medicine, engineering to management, environmental science to computer science, the military to public policy—are more successful if they are effective communicators who can express their arguments compellingly in multiple modes and media. Effective communicators have strong written, oral, and visual competencies. In addition, with rapidly expanding social networking technologies, multimodal competencies increasingly rely on electronic modes of communication—for example, cell phones, social media, the Internet, and digital video.

In this chapter, you will learn more about factors affecting the synergy of modes and media. The chapter defines communication and addresses issues related to rules and conventions affecting modes and media. To define communication, it considers two questions you might ask about a writing and communication class: Can’t I just learn the rules? and What do conventions have to do with rhetoric and multimodality? Once the definition of communication is established, the chapter then discusses multimodal synergy and describes a series of multimodal examples created by students at Georgia Tech. The chapter concludes with a discussion of four important questions:

• Why focus so much on modes other than writing?
• How does multimodal synergy relate to expectations for students?
• How does multimodal synergy enhance intellectual development?
• Why are self-reflection and self-assessment about communication processes and artifacts important?

What Is Communication?

If you ask 100 different people to define communication, you may get nearly 100 variations in their responses. This chapter establishes common ground for your work in English 1101 and English 1102, focusing on what communication is and isn’t.

Communication is an area of disciplinary study (in the sense of intellectual inquiry) as well as a dynamic, interpersonal practice (in the sense that communication enables us to interact with others, whether in classrooms, workplaces, homes, or communities). Some people think that this study and practice are about the transmission of information—a one-way process that involves a sender encoding information and a receiver decoding that information.

It’s not.

This sign is a reminder that the transmission model is not a sufficient explanation of the way communication works, whether in written, oral, visual, or nonverbal communication because, in part, context and interaction are omitted.

Courtesy of Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program.

Communication is dynamic and synergistic, involving many factors that go far beyond simple transmission. Consider these basic features of communication:

• Communication is dynamic, involving an interactive process affected by context, intention, and interpretation.
• Communication involves rhetorical elements in interdependent (that is, synergistic) relationships; each rhetorical element (e.g., content, context, purpose, audience, argument, organization, evidence, medium, design, and various kinds of conventions) is affected by others.
• Communication involves writers, readers, speakers, listeners, designers, and viewers, all of whom interact in specific contexts and respond to specific situations.
• Communication has conventions for writing, speaking, designing, and nonverbal behaviors that are culturally determined and change with situation and time.

Communication isn’t just about the words, sounds, or images of a message; it’s about the entire communicative situation. For example, specific audiences have idiosyncratic intentions, abilities, expectations, contexts, and experiences, all of which affect interpretation.

What about just learning the rules?

Communication is not about learning a single, well-defined set of rules that tells how and how not to communicate in every situation. Learning mechanical rules by themselves, decontextualized and without nuance, doesn’t make you a good communicator. It just makes you a good rule follower. In fact, following rules while ignoring cultural differences in language and ignoring the rhetorical elements and their synergy usually results in inadequate, inappropriate, or oversimplified communication.

Learning about common academic and professional conventions for communication can make you a competent and powerful communicator in many situations, but it won’t prepare you for all situations. For example, if you’re tweeting about your favorite TV show, you won’t write formal academic prose that follows all the conventions of Standard American English. The conventions that govern social spaces like Twitter differ from those that govern most academic and professional contexts. Good communicators know how to adapt to different contexts, recognizing and using the conventions that best enable them to share their ideas and build productive relationships. Although no single set of rules governs all communication situations, you can learn conventions associated with different contexts, cultures, and countries and use them strategically to represent yourself favorably in a variety of situations.

What do conventions have to do with rhetoric & multimodality?

Learning about rhetorical elements—such as context, purpose, and audience—helps you to analyze communication situations and choose the conventions and styles that fit them best. Understanding rhetorical principles is the key to adaptive strategies that define successful communicators. A strong rhetorical foundation allows you to adapt to different conventions within a mode. For example, understanding the needs of different audiences helps a scientist giving oral presentations to choose precise scientific terminology for an audience of professional experts or to choose a more general vocabulary for an audience of nonexperts.

A strong rhetorical foundation also allows you to adapt to the conventions of different modes and media. For example, an architect creating print plans for a new building might use shading and other conventions that suggest three-dimensionality in a static image. The same architect creating plans on a computer might use software that not only allows people to see a three-dimensional view by rotating a dynamic image but also enables viewers to step into a three-dimensional representation to see the building from the inside. The conventions of print and digital media allow for different representations of the same ideas. A competent communicator analyzes the context, purpose, and audience of the communication to determine which type of representation—and thus which modes and media—will be most effective.

With this background to help you think about modes and media in academic and professional communication, let’s return to the topic of multimodal synergy. To understand why multimodal synergy enhances communication, we first need to extend our definition of multimodality and then look at several examples.

What Is Multimodal Synergy?

According to researcher and theorist Gunther Kress, “[C]ommunication is always and inevitably multimodal” (“Gains and Losses” 5). Multimodality is so important, Kress explains, that “it is no longer possible to understand language and its uses without understanding the effect of all modes of communication that are co-present in any text” (“Multimodality” 337). Colleagues of Kress, including Carey Jewitt, explain that communication includes “all meaning-making systems” (Jewitt et al. 5).

We use the term multimodality to describe communication that occurs in different forms, or modes, and through different media. Understanding the differences is not always easy because the terms mode and medium are sometimes used in ways that overlap. For example, writing is a form in which you can represent your ideas, but it is also a means through which you can share your ideas with others. Writing is a mode that gives form to your ideas, while printed pages and Web pages are media through which you might choose to share ideas.

The overlap between modes and media is not simply a matter of fuzzy thinking or imprecise terminology. If a mode is a form and a medium is the means, the two quite naturally go hand in hand: writing as a mode (the combination of symbols, generally alphanumeric characters, and spaces to form units of meaning such as words and sentences) doesn’t exist until you put it into a medium (such as the paper or Web page on which the combined symbols appear). Similarly, a mode is rarely discrete. For the sake of analysis, we can distinguish written communication from visual communication by defining the former as the combination of alphanumeric symbols that make meaning for readers and the latter as the use of images that also make meaning by appealing to the eye.

This distinction between mode and medium allows us to think about a printed word as something with characteristics that differ from a primarily visual artifact, such as a photograph. Such thinking is useful because examining the ways in which printed words and photographs make meaning differently can help us to understand how to use words and photographs more effectively. In another sense, though, the distinction between a word and an image is artificial because a word is also an image. It makes meaning by appealing to the eye. The three examples of “word” that follow demonstrate ways in which a word is an image.

^{Courtesy of Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program}

The numerals and alphabetic representation of “word” are in the written mode; they are combinations of symbols that form units of meaning—the word “word”—but the differences in typographic style, size, and upper- and lowercase font emphasize various ways in which these words are also images. The first “word,” which appears in a common, professional-looking font (Times New Roman) and all capital letters, might convey the ordinariness and perhaps the authority of the word “word.” The second “word,” which appears in a script font intended to mimic handwriting (Mistral) in an italic style and in all lowercase letters, might convey the idea that a word can be informal and difficult to control. The third “word,” which appears in a fancier script font (Vivaldi) and in upper- and lowercase letters, might convey the idea that a word can be elegant and formal.

A word is both alphabetic and visual. Since one characteristic of a written word is that it corresponds to certain sounds, it can also be oral. A word can appear on a Web site, so it can also be electronic. Finally, the way a word looks might give you cues about gestures you could make while speaking it: for example, you might use a dramatic flourish of your hands as you speak a word written like version 1; you might bend over and whisper as you speak a word written like version 2; and you might put on airs and use a snooty accent while saying version 3. A word, therefore, can be completely WOVEN: written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal.

Since synergy happens when things work together productively, the term multimodal synergy describes the ways in which modes and media coexist and interact within any instance of communication. The word synergy was first used in the English language in the mid-17th century, and the meaning has remained relatively stable, as you can see in the textbox explaining the etymology of the word.

Whether you are analyzing or creating an artifact such as an advertisement that superimposes words on a photograph or a Web site that integrates text, sound, and images on a screen, you should consider the ways in which modes and media work synergistically to inform and persuade your target audiences.

Why Focus So Much on Modes Other than Writing?

By emphasizing multimodal synergy, Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program is not trying to de-emphasize the importance of writing or to add more items to your list of things to study. Rather, you are being asked to study the elements that coexist and interact with writing. Multimodal synergy isn’t about learning more; it’s about learning better.

Why not just focus on writing?

Not all colleges and universities teach multimodal communication as part of their core requirements. In fact, Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program was once called simply the Writing Program, and though classes sometimes included digital media and other forms of communication beyond alphabetic text on printed pages, writing still dominated the objectives and outcomes for students’ learning. Why? The answer is deceptively simple: historically, the ability to write well has long been considered the hallmark of an educated person. This idea is problematic for two reasons: first, the notion of writing “well” suggests absolute definitions of good and bad writing, and second, the notion of an “educated” person suggests that a person simply is or isn’t educated. This thinking involves binaries; that is, it reduces multiple possibilities into paired options such as good/bad and is/isn’t, and in doing so it oversimplifies both writing and education.

As other sections of this textbook demonstrate, writing is rhetorical, and thus it depends on variable elements such as audience and context. What’s appropriate for one audience in one context could be entirely inappropriate for another audience in another context, so communicators can’t be certain of writing well in every situation simply because they are successful in a college writing program.

Binary formulations about writing and education do more than oversimplify the rhetorical dimensions of communication: they imply hierarchies of value that are inextricable from economic class and other aspects of cultural identity. Judgments about appropriate and inappropriate writing (what some people might even call “good writing” and “bad writing”) are, in a sense, matters of taste; and, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues in his seminal study Distinction, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” and thus it can “fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences” (6–7). In other words, when you judge something to be good or bad (or appropriate or inappropriate), you reveal something about your own education while you imply that a certain type of education (probably yours) is intrinsically better than others. Georgia Tech’s own president spoke with English 1101 students about the complexity of planning an education for the 21st century, one that moves students well beyond binary formulations.

For example, if you judge a piece of writing that violates grammatical conventions to be bad, you reveal what you have learned about grammatical conventions. Opportunities for learning are not equal for everyone. If you learned about grammatical conventions in high school or college, then you had the privilege of attending high school or college instead of having to work full-time for your own or others’ sustenance. Knowledge about art, literature, communication, and other areas of study are a kind of cultural capital, associated with social status, and as Bourdieu claims, some forms of cultural capital “can only be acquired by means of a sort of withdrawal from economic necessity” (53–54). When someone judges a person as “educated” because she or he writes “well,” then the judge’s claim, intentional or not, reflects on that person’s economic background. The judgment classifies the person whose writing it judges, and in doing so, it classifies the judge as the sort of person who has enough cultural capital to make such a judgment. Thus, the judge’s taste differentiates people with economic access to education from people who lack such access.

How do the power & privilege of communication contribute to cultural capital?

Reading and writing alphabetic text have a particularly strong historical association with cultural capital. In an autobiographical account of his life as a slave in the United States in the 19th century, Frederick Douglass writes about how he learned that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read” from a slave owner who explained that a slave “should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do.” As Douglass learned to read and write, he gained knowledge and power—and thus he defied the constraints of his social station. The connection Douglass makes between this sort of knowledge and political power marks alphabetic text as a—and perhaps the—privileged form of communication. To paraphrase an old adage, pens and keyboards, not swords and guns, have the might to make and break nations.

If reading and writing have such a privileged relationship to culture and power, students, parents, teachers, and legislators might have good reason to contend that writing is the most important mode and that it should therefore be the primary, if not the sole, focus of communication instruction in college. While in many situations writing might be the most powerful and appropriate form of communication, the question “Is writing the most important mode?” demands a binary yes/no answer, and the answer is rarely that simple. The importance of writing is, like everything else related to communication, highly contextual. Instead of trying to judge one mode as better or more important than the others, successful communicators will assess when, why, and how one mode might be the most powerful or appropriate while considering how that mode’s interactions with other modes will affect it. Georgia Tech emphasizes multimodality in part because a communicator cannot fully understand or effectively use writing or any other mode without understanding how that mode relates to others within a given rhetorical situation.

Scientific communication provides many instructive examples about the ways in which combinations of modes and media create historic successes and failures. One obvious example of a scientist whose success depends in part on his competence as a communicator is Stephen Hawking. Beyond his articles for peer scientists, Hawking writes books and creates films and television specials for general audiences (including children). Hawking has been able not only to help his ideas gain traction but also to gain enormous popularity—including being the subject of the 2014 film The Theory of Everything.

However, writing isn’t the only form of communication competence that successful science requires. One of the most notorious incidents in the history of scientific debates about the possibility of cold fusion does not stem from a piece of writing but from public speaking. When Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced at a press conference on March 23, 1989, that they had achieved cold fusion, they started more than two decades of public outrage and condemnation, and their work became a synonym for junk science. Simply put, accuracy and credibility are critical aspects of good communication. Recently, cold fusion is getting a second look by scientists, reenergizing the debate. Of course, a piece of writing is rarely purely written, and a press conference is never purely oral: you can find graphs and pictures in Hawking’s academic works, you can see the colorful images alongside the text in Hawking’s children’s books, you can see Pons and Fleischmann’s infamous press conference on YouTube, and you can see and hear a 2009 story about the recent investigations related to cold fusion on the television program 60 Minutes.

Writing certainly remains important, and thus in your communication classes at Georgia Tech you will be expected to write a great deal—and to write well. Nevertheless, most writing today occurs on computers, and like the scientific examples just cited, most professional communication today requires communicators to use writing in conjunction with other modes in order to share their ideas and perform successfully in their jobs. The emphasis on multimodality in English 1101 and 1102 affirms writing’s importance and seeks to enhance your cultural maneuverability by teaching you to communicate using the modes and media that define contemporary society.

How Does Multimodal Synergy Relate to Expectations for Students?

The synergy of modes and media is similar to the synergy that occurs in learning and memory. Think about the sorts of cues that might help you to remember a film you saw a long time ago. If you saw the line “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” in print, you might not think of a particular film title. If you saw the line in print and heard someone read it aloud, you still might not get it. If you saw and heard the line and also viewed a drawing of the related animal, your chances of thinking of the film’s title are better.

If you saw and heard the line, saw a picture, and heard the repeating notes from John Williams’s famous soundtrack, you’d be very, very likely to think of the film Jaws (1975). Exposure to ideas expressed in different modes and media gives you multiple ways to recall and analyze those ideas.

How does multimodality help learning?

Learning and memory are more likely to be successful when multiple modes and media are involved, but combinations of modes and media won’t affect everyone the same way. Some people believe they learn better by reading, while others believe they learn better by hearing, by seeing, or by movement and tactile engagement. However, you should not conflate personal preferences and abilities with a singular learning style.

Cognitive psychologists suggest that such individual preferences and abilities don’t neatly add up to a learning style. Instead, virtually everyone can learn new information, whether the meaning is presented in a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic manner. While many people prefer learning through visual, auditory, or tactile means, their personal preferences and abilities don’t impede their learning but rather strengthen it.

^{ILLUSTRATION
Shark
Credit: Timothy Knepp, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.}

Your chances of learning increase when you recognize that your abilities across modes (written, oral, visual, nonverbal/kinesthetic) can enhance your learning and your recall as well as your use of new ideas and processes. Your own multimodal communication allows you greater power as a learner. For example, encountering the same idea in different modes/forms is likely to improve your learning because each version (or iteration) of the idea can reinforce the others. When a professor lectures about the concepts you’ve read about in a textbook, the oral communication reinforces the written communication. When you draw a diagram that uses arrows to show how pictured objects relate to one another and then write a paragraph that explains what the arrows between the objects mean, your combination of visuals with alphabetic text increases your chances of recalling the relationships you represent.

Though research is unlikely to uncover a single best way to accommodate all approaches to learning, a survey of research about multimodality conducted by the Metiri Group for Cisco Systems indicates that “students engaged in learning that incorporates multimodal designs, on average, outperform students who learn using traditional approaches with single modes.” By increasing your competence in multiple modes and media, you increase your chances of understanding the unfamiliar and sometimes difficult concepts you encounter in college.

Conduct an online search for the Cisco report, “Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says.” Read about the myths and then learn about what is affecting your own learning. #Understand

The communication courses you take at Georgia Tech allow you to gain experience with different modes and media. Given time to reflect about these modes and media, you should be able to develop insight about ways to take advantage of them to increase your learning. This insight should help you to learn more and to learn faster, making you not only a better communicator but also a better student.

The communication courses you take at Georgia Tech allow you to gain experience with different modes and media. Given time to reflect about these modes and media, you should be able to develop insight about ways to take advantage of them to increase your learning. This insight should help you to learn more and to learn faster, making you not only a better communicator but also a better student.

How does multimodality encourage translation, transformation, & transference?

The notion that a single idea can be expressed in different modes and media requires some exploration. As media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed, “the medium is the message.” You can’t separate form from content. If you return to the display of word in three different typefaces above on this page, where the appearance of the word changes what it expresses, the ideas are inseparable from the shapes they take. However, you can represent a single idea through different modes and media, using those modes and media strategically to increase your audiences’ understanding of the idea. The content of the sentence “A word is both written and visual” and the visual depiction of that idea exist simultaneously. The content and its visual depiction demonstrate that modes coexist and interact. To reinforce the coexistence and interaction (that is, the synergy), consider how your reaction to the content of this book would be affected if the visual representation were transformed—if fonts were dramatically different and if the color and texture of the paper on which this book is printed were markedly different. In general, considering transformation makes the synergy between written and visual modes clear. Learning more about concepts we call translation, transformation, and transference will help you understand more about multimodality.

Translation involves adapting information for a new audience. In the workplace, translation might involve adapting information in a medical journal to a mass-market newspaper. In English 1101 or English 1102, you might translate information you have collected in a face-to-face interview with a musician, artist, performer, scientist, or engineer by simplifying the language so it makes sense to the general reader.

Translation is rhetorical—whether you are translating text designed for English readers to one for an audience of Japanese readers or translating a visual designed for experts in aerospace engineering to one for nonexperts watching CNN. You consider the rhetorical situation and preferences of your new audience—contextual influences, conceptual sophistication, vocabulary, responsiveness to various kinds of evidence, familiarity with different kinds of visuals, preferences in design, appropriateness of mode and medium for the purpose, and so on. Imagine, for example, that you have interviewed a biomechanical engineer who has invented a new kind of prosthesis. For a short article in an annual report, you need to translate the engineer’s discussion of materials and mechanics into a description that an audience without an engineering background can understand.

^{PHOTO
Close-up of a domestic passport. Oversized reproduction of photo, address, and signature page that all black citizens in South Africa needed to carry with them during apartheid, now displayed as a nearly 7’ tall exhibition in the Kwa Muhle Museum, Durban, South Africa.
Credit: Photo © R. E. Burnett.}

^{PHOTO
Signature page on domestic passport. Oversized reproduction of the kind of passport that all black citizens in South Africa were required to carry with them during apartheid, now displayed in the Kwa Muhle Museum, Durban, South Africa.
Credit: Photo © R. E. Burnett.}

Transformation involves changing and reshaping ideas or information. These examples provide some sense of the nature of transformation:

• Changing genre (e.g., moving a print brochure to information on a Web site)
• Changing scale (e.g., from a postage stamp to a poster)
• Changing medium (e.g., from a live demonstration to a video)
• Changing scope (e.g., from a lengthy manual to a one-page tip sheet)
• Changing color palette (e.g., from a four-color to a sepia-tone photograph)
• Changing pacing (e.g., from a self-paced to an automated PowerPoint)

When you transform an idea from a representation in one mode or medium to a representation in another mode or medium, you consider how the transformation affects rhetorical elements. How does the transformation affect your audience? How does it reflect your purpose? How does it change the organization of your ideas?

Consider the challenge of helping people to understand concepts and practices foreign to their experience and culture. For example, how can a museum in South Africa help foreign visitors understand the horrors of apartheid—legally enforced racial segregation? One way is to reproduce the passes (shown in the accompanying photos of a museum exhibit) that black South Africans needed in order to go anywhere outside the black settlements.

In the exhibit about apartheid (legal in South Africa from 1948 to 1994), the museum transformed a pass from its original dimensions (about the size of a modern passport) to a dramatically large model (nearly 7′ tall). The transformation in scale reinforced the power differential—official government control that stripped black South Africans of their citizenship, eliminated voting rights, restricted employment, and forced people to relocate to segregated black settlements. A transformed pass was displayed to represent the tremendous control it wielded. The transformed pass is larger than the 6′ model of a man holding an actual pass.

Transference involves applying communication strategies from one context to another. The ability to transfer strategies is one of the most important skills you can learn in college; literally, you are transferring your learning from one situation to another. Gaining enough familiarity with a concept or strategy to help you in a single situation doesn’t do you much good in the long run (though it may help you pass a quiz the next day). What’s important is long-term learning—the ability to generalize from one situation to another.

The greater the similarity in the two situations, the closer the proximity in time, and the greater the relevance you see from one situation to another, the more likely you are to transfer your learning. So, when in week three of an English course you learn that evaluating sources involves assessing credibility, relevancy, currency, and reliability, you’re likely to use these criteria not only in the paper you write in week four but also in the history paper you write in week five. You may be less likely to use these criteria in an engineering report you write in week 14. Why? Even though all three disciplines (English, history, and engineering) require evaluating sources, you may see English and engineering as dissimilar, have forgotten what you temporarily learned 10 weeks ago, and consider the work you do in English to be irrelevant to the work you do in engineering. The problem might be compounded by the fact that your engineering professor knows that you were supposed to learn about evaluation in English classes, sees the similarity, proximity, and relevance to your engineering assignment, and expects you to transfer the learning without direct instruction. If you have actually learned about evaluating sources, however, you should be able to transfer the knowledge from one situation to another. For learning to be transferrable, you must be able to adapt your prior knowledge to new situations.

One productive way to increase transference is to increase your use of verbal and visual metaphors, which help you compare dissimilar or unfamiliar concepts, processes, or objects. By identifying similarities, you can develop new ways of thinking, transferring what you know to help you think about unfamiliar concepts, processes, or objects in new ways. Metaphors can help you carry over or transfer meaning from one situation to another.

Transference has additional practical value for you. In your study and practice of communication, both in communication classes and in other classes, jobs, or situations where you are expected to communicate effectively, you will be engaged in two broad kinds of learning, both of which involve transference:

• Learning to communicate involves developing effective ways to share ideas. You should expect to transfer what you learn in communication classes to all other communication you do in academic, workplace, personal, and community situations. You can see the value of transferring strategies such as making arguments, adapting to various audiences, selecting and organizing evidence, respecting different cultures, and designing effective pages and screens.
• Communicating to learn involves using communication in order to understand new and sometimes difficult concepts. Specifically, you can use communicating to learn strategies that include writing definitions and descriptions, creating comparison tables, listing arguments and counterarguments, diagramming key components, synthesizing opposing views, summarizing specifications, categorizing kinds of evidence, and graphing changes over time.

How Does Multimodal Synergy Enhance Intellectual Development?

The ways you think about and use modes and media influence your intellectual development. This section focuses on cognition and representation, encouraging what is often called metacognition—that is, thinking about thinking, a kind of self-awareness about your own thinking processes that enables you to monitor and change these processes in productive ways. The metacognitive questions in the margins of this textbook are just one way it prompts reflective thinking and action regarding composing and multimodal synergy. Metacognition helps you consider ways to use modes and media to represent various ideas, processes, and objects.

How does multimodality affect cognition?

The term cognition refers to mental processes involved in thinking—which includes activities such as knowing, understanding, remembering, questioning, analyzing, evaluating, using, and solving problems. When we think, we respond to multimodal cues, but because we have individual approaches to learning, we respond to and often prefer one mode over another. For example, when you’re learning new information, do you prefer to read about it or watch a video? Do you prefer a hands-on activity that lets you try out the new idea or process? Do you prefer observing a face-to-face demonstration or listening to a podcast? Your preference for one mode or another doesn’t make you a better or worse thinker or learner (see the discussion of learning styles earlier in the chapter), but it influences the ways in which you may choose to learn and communicate. Unless you have specific learning disabilities, you can learn in all modes, so you need to be at least competent in creating and interpreting all modes. Personal and professional success is more likely to come if you are excellent rather than merely competent.

Regardless of the mode, and no matter how good you are in engineering, math, and science, most theorists believe that thinking requires language. The classic example is based on a theory offered more than 50 years ago by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who speculated that language determines the way we think. Even though most linguists think Whorf’s position is extreme, they nonetheless agree that language lets us name, recall, investigate, and build on abstractions (e.g., feelings), phenomena (e.g., color), objects (e.g., the Hubble telescope), events (e.g., a soccer game), and processes (e.g., splicing a gene). Being good with language (written, oral, and nonverbal) is a strong influence on your ability as a thinker. The better you are with language, the more productive you will be as a thinker and doer.

_{Thoughtfully select and name three of the colors represented in the color chart. See if others can accurately match your color names with the actual colors. The names you selected aren’t arbitrary, so what makes the task difficult?#Understand #Apply}