In our “new normal” (I hate saying that), I think that multimodal writing and communication is important more than ever. We are living in an increasingly digital world, and the ways that we communicate on a daily basis have changed drastically. I agree with Takayoshi and Selfe’s article that there is an urgent need for more multimodal writing assignments.

As someone who teaches business writing, my main goal is to give the students the confidence to be flexible when faced with new challenges in their writing at work. I try to give them many different assignments, both short and long form, that will help for larger assignments but those don’t necessarily address the daily needs of communication. As I write this, I’m receiving emails, getting Microsoft Teams messages, and will eventually prepare a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming account meeting. While I dream of writing beautiful essays and letters, the reality of my work life is multimodal in so many different ways.

I think I look at multimodal writing skills as separate from the general writing skills I am hoping to teach: organization, transition, traditional formatting. In reality, these are the same skills, just executed in a new format. While I have students mainly work in PowerPoint for certain presentations, I’m always impressed by the students who use Prezi, or create another type of presentation. I think it would be important for me to open up assignments for different forms like podcasts or videos. The process to create a cohesive narrative or argument remains the same- the students now are executing the very core of what I hope to accomplish as a teacher: flexibility in different formats. I found Sweetland’s multimodal guide incredibly helpful for planning future assignments that can incorporate multimodal writing.