You’ve probably run into this term in Unit 3 of ENG 1101 or ENG 1121, or in some other class, and wondered what in the world your instructor was talking about.
The answer is pretty simple – in fact, it’s something you already know and use. It’s just the term that’s new.
A mode is a way we communicate information – through written words, music, spoken language, images, videos, waving our arms…
When we use more than one at a time, that’s multimodal!
See? Simple.
To get technical, there are five modes:
- Visual – anything you can see whether it’s a still picture or the page of a comic or a video
- Linguistic – alphabetic text that’s written or spoken
- Audio – sounds like voices or music
- Spatial – how something is arranged in a space
- Gestural (or kinesthetic) – gesture and movement (those waving arms…)
Right now you’re probably thinking that we use more than one at a time no matter how we’re communicating. Like a text message is linguistic because it’s written and also visual because it’s something we can see, and often lives in a text bubble that’s arranged a certain way, and often uses emojis to take the place of gestures.
So don’t we already live and work and communicate in a multimodal way?
You are correct! That is, in fact, multimodal communication on an everyday level. We hardly think about the fact that almost all our communications are multimodal. There are even theorists who say there’s no such thing as a single mode (that’s another post).
So what’s the big deal?
It’s all about being intentional, about deciding what modes work best together depending on your purpose and audience. Giving information to a little kid means you’re probably not going to give them a big block of written text… because they’re not going to read it. But lots of pictures and colors and a few words mean they’re at least going look at it.
That’s multimodal composition!
Teens and college students get a lot of information from Instagram with its combination of pictures and written text and occasionally video.
Again, that’s multimodal composition.
When you get an assignment that asks for a multimodal project, you have to decide not only on content, but on how that content is going to be presented based on purpose and audience. Here are possible multimodal projects:
- Instagram stories/reels
- Infographics
- Video
- Music
- TikToks
- Performance Art
- Photo Essay
- Blog
- Collage and found-material art
- Brochures
- Podcasts
- Web pages
- Interactive stories
- Video games
- Short stories (they’re arranged on a page, right? That’s visual mode!)
So next time you’re asked to create a multimodal project, think about what you like to create anyway (do you make YouTube videos? Comics? Music?) and whether it would work for your purpose and audience.
And be thoughtful – we’re living in a multimodal world and messages matter!
Want to read more about multimodality? Check this out — it explains it and how to use it in your classes.
