When you think of “writing,” particularly for a college course, you’re likely to imagine a standard conception of writing – a word document or piece of paper with a words on it and not much else. But there is much more to writing, composition, and communication than just the printed text on a page. In this chapter we will discuss the concept of multimodality, particularly as it pertains to digital writing.

It’s likely that you already have a lot of experience with multimodal composition – which is, simply put, writing by combining different types (or modes) of communication. Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe give us a more specific definition, describing multimodal texts as “texts that exceed the alphabetical and may include still and moving images, animators, color, words, music, and sound.”^[1] So, multimodal texts might include things like PowerPoints, social media posts, TikToks, posters, infographics – anything that communicates in multiple ways.

There are five primary modes of communication that can be combined to create a multimodal text. They are:

When looking at these modes, some might argue that all communication is multimodal. For example, an essay that includes no images still has visual, spatial, linguistic, and aural components. Such an essay must be read with your eyes (visual), it is laid out a certain way (spatial), it uses typeface (linguistic), and it contains spacing and type treatments that are visually silent, but when read aloud with a screen reader produce different sounds, inflections, pauses, and/or emphases (aural). In a standard essay, the linguistic mode receives much more emphasis than the other modes. Thus, when we think of a multimodal text, written essays do not initially come to mind. In the multimodal composition classroom, we acknowledge that written essays are multimodal, but we tend to focus on multimodal texts that combine sound, images, movement, gestures, and/or text.

It is important to learn how to compose multimodal texts for a variety of reasons. Learning how to write traditional essays and reports will be sufficient for much of your academic career, but in some classes you may be required to include multimodal elements. For instance, a great deal of writing in the sciences includes data visualizations (charts, graphs, etc.) as key components of the writing. And you may be asked to compose in a variety of digital formats using several modes. Learning how to effectively compose multimodal texts will help you do that work. In your future careers, you may often be asked to communicate (sometimes complex) information to the public. Oftentimes, a multimodal text will be the best way to do so. For example, think of how the CDC distributed information about vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. They used graphs, maps, charts, and tables to share information; an academic essay about vaccines would have been an ineffective genre for delivering vaccine information to the general public. Further, the CDC communicated using social media, websites, and video- and sound-based media (television and radio) to deliver its Public Service Announcements. You will learn about composing multimodal texts in this chapter.

Choosing the Right Mode

Selecting modes is very similar to the process of selecting an appropriate genre of writing, and indeed there is oftentimes much overlap there. Usually, when you are choosing what kind of multimodal text to write, it is dependent on the rhetorical situation—your audience, your purpose, and the context. You have a particular purpose to achieve and an audience to reach, and you may choose the modes that will make your message most effective.

When choosing which modes to use, ask if there are any constraints—things that limit your use of a mode or if any particular mode limits the effectiveness of your message. Also consider any possible affordances—things that you are good at or if any particular mode enhances the effectiveness of your message. For example, it may be a constraint that you are inexperienced at video editing, but the use of moving visuals (e.g., a YouTube video) is an affordance because it is the best way to reach your audience. Constraints and affordances are crucial considerations to make as a part of your rhetorical situation. You will be inclined to rely on affordances, so careful consideration of potential constraints must be heeded. Constraints determine how (or if) our communications can happen, and constraints can be caused by the following things:

• Context – The place, time, timing, and urgency of your composition may affect your available means of communication. For example, some modes and genres of communication are simply more effective at reaching people quickly for more urgent communications.
• Audience – There may be constraints based on your audience. Language differences, internet access, and cultural issues might all affect the mode, genre, and platform of your communication. For example, you would not want to use a Facebook post to reach with a younger audience, but it would be a good idea to use one to communicate with an older one.
• Purpose – Your purpose can be a constraint on the effectiveness of particular modes of communication. For example, if you are trying to create a resource that people can revisit any time they need information, social media might not be the best way to go because of its often ephemeral nature, but a website would be an excellent choice.
• Genre – All genres have some amount of constraint on the modes available for that genre. For example, if you are creating a podcast, the visual mode is unavailable to you, and if you are writing an essay, the gestural mode is difficult to incorporate.

Understanding the constraints of your rhetorical situation is an important first step in choosing which modes to use in your composition. Different modes can be more or less effective in different situations, so it’s also important to understand what the most effective modes are for your rhetorical situation. Here are some things you can do to help you determine the effectiveness (affordances) of a particular mode of communication:

• Audience analysis – Your audience may be more inclined to read, interact with, or be convinced by a particular mode, and it’s extremely important to understand when that is the case. For instance, perhaps your audience prefers visual evidence, in which case you should lean heavily on the visual mode.
• Studying similar situations – It’s always helpful to look at what others have done and how effective those attempts have been. So, when deciding which mode to use, look for examples that have a similar purpose or audience to your own, and see what modes have worked. It’s generally a good idea to find one example that you think is exceptional and one that you think could be better to compare their relative merits.
• Play to your strengths – Perhaps you have a lot of experience making visual designs, or simply feel that you are better at speaking in person than you are at writing. If you are able to, leverage those strengths and experiences! Choosing to incorporate communicative modes that you are familiar with or have a great deal of confidence in can help you create more effective multimodal texts.

Finally, in choosing a mode, make sure you have all of the information that you need to compose effectively in that mode. This will require some research on your part. Look for guidelines, examples, best practices, tutorials, advice from experts, and anything that can help tell you how to effectively compose in your chosen mode(s).

Learning how to compose multimodal texts opens up a wide array of possibilities for you as a writer. While written text alone has the potential to be effective, incorporating multiple modes gives you more avenues to connect with and engage your audience. The modes also help to support cultural and linguistic diversity by giving readers more ways to interact with your text, and thus help to improve the equity of and access to your writing. To help further improve equity and ensure that your readers can access your text, you should also take into consideration usability and accessibility when deciding which modes to use and when composing in those modes, because some modes may be more or less usable or accessible than others.

Usability

Examples of poor multimodal composition are easy to find. Consider this visually chaotic website for a news network.

What makes these examples problematic? Primarily, the issue is that writers have not  accomplished their goals effectively conveying information to their audiences. For example, the news network website is disorganized and cluttered. The purpose of the website is confusing for viewers, and each of its links take audience members off the landing page. In other words, if you are the user – the person landing on this webpage, you would struggle to determine its purpose and message.

Problems with usability often stem from issues of organization and interface. It’s not that the information isn’t in the composition, it’s that users are unable to find, access, or understand the information they have been given. The information may not be where the user expects it, the labels or headings are inaccurate, or content is missing, or links are broken or misdirected. These are all usability problems – and they’re very frustrating for your audience. More often than not, usability problems will cause audiences to seek information elsewhere.

User Experience

Usability is a term that focuses attention on users, rather than focusing exclusively on the content or information being provided. To develop your ability to consider usability when you write, keep in mind your own experiences with compositions that were difficult to read or navigate and how frustrated you were in those situations. Usability allows you to consider your project from the perspective of the people who will be interacting with it, which means that you’re thinking about your project from the audience’s point of view.

Usability is about how easy it is for the user to achieve their objective. That is, usability shouldn’t necessarily be about the goals that you think your audience should have, but how well they can accomplish their own goals and how they feel about doing so. If you don’t understand the goals of your audience first, you might design something that will not lead to a productive user experience.

Usability isn’t just about how easy your writing is to understand. Your composition may be easy to follow but otherwise fail to meet what your audience’s needs. Usability is a nexus between ease of use, audience, and assumed and actual goals. This may sound like usability involves too many contingencies for any one person to account for – how could you possible anticipate everything a user might want to do with your website, infographic, or report? To some extent, this is true; you can’t plan for every possible contingency. And you may not have the resources to know all of your audience members’ goals and expectations. Nonetheless, it is a best practice to think about what your audience’s concerns may be and to act as an advocate for them in the design process. But in some situations, you may be able to employ usability testing to answer these concerns.

Usability testing occurs when you engage with the actual or imagined users of your writing to collect data and to determine how usable your design is and what issues interfere with its usability. In practice, usability is a matter of both development and testing. In other words, for compositions to be most usable, your audience’s needs should be central concerns throughout the design, production, and delivery phases of your workflow. Think of usability testing as watching your audience interact with your writing and taking detailed notes about what you see during their experience.

Usability is a complex concept, but for this class, it’s enough to understand that usability is an issue to consider to more effectively accomplish our purpose. Here are some common areas where usability issues arise in writing:

• Clarity
• Consistency
• Familiarity with genre
• Functionality
• Readability
• Skimability
• Simplicity
• Visibility

These areas have a lot to do with things addressed elsewhere in this book, such as vocabulary, spacing, headings, font choices, and more. To help you think through them in your writing, here are some questions you can ask to help you incorporate usability principles into your writing:

And finally, here are some tips to make your writing more usable:

• User-friendly language
• Direct address (“you”)

• Pro Tip:

  Use Serif fonts for printed material and sans serif fonts for screens.

  Active voice

• Simple & concise sentences & words
• Highly readable fonts
• Bolding & underlining
• Clear, descriptive headings
• Bullet points
• Signal phrases
• High contrast
• Large font size
• Consistent, readable layout colors
• Clear & consistent paragraph design

Whether you are writing or designing – or, most often, doing both – you always want to do so with an eye toward usability. Your goal is to ensure a positive user experience – which will help you accomplish the goals of your writing. Thinking in terms of usability means thinking in terms of audience. Even if your audience is not available for questioning or testing, you should still ask yourself who will use your writing, how they will use it, what are their needs and goals, and how you can make it easier for them to achieve those goals. You will want to keep in mind concerns such as cultural contexts and accessibility.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the extent to which something can be used by as many people as possible despite any obstacles that may limit their use of the thing. Put simply, accessibility means designing across difference. If you have heard of accessibility before, you probably think of it in terms of designing products that may be used by people with disabilities (like wheelchair ramps or hearing aids). But accessibility is an important concern in everything we create, including compositions. For instance, a piece of writing could be inaccessible to some if it can only be read visually, or a set of instructions may be inaccessible to those incapable of performing all of its steps.

Writing accessibly means thinking about the range of different experiences and abilities that readers bring to your document. An accessible composition affords as many different ways of engaging with the material as possible in as many contexts as possible.

This type of thinking is closely related to universal design principles, in which designers attempt to create things that are accessible to everybody. Thinking and designing and writing in such an inclusive way has benefits for all of us, and designing with accessibility in mind has the potential to make your compositions easier for everyone to use. Accessibility considerations often lead to innovations that are applicable beyond a design’s original scope. For examples, audiobooks, remote controls, and text messaging were all originally created for people with disabilities, but became ubiquitous technologies that many people use every day.

Direct and Indirect Access

When thinking about accessibility in your writing, it’s important to keep in mind that there are two different kinds of access: direct and indirect. Direct access refers to an accessible development that facilitates unassisted access to something. For instance, direct access developments would include adding closed captioning to an audio composition to increase accessibility for hearing impaired users, or adding hover capability to links to increase accessibility for color-blind users. Indirect access provides users with assistive technology or ensures compatibility with existing assistive technology. You would be writing for indirect access, for instance, if you were creating a website and checking to make sure that it is compatible with screen reading technology.

Here are some tips for designing and writing for both direct and indirect access:

• Use color to highlight and complement rather than as the only means of conveying something.
• Use high contrast, especially between text and background.
• Keep your audience in mind and avoid words that they might be unfamiliar with.
• Consider language difference and whether something should be available in multiple languages.
• Accompany text with informative visual cues, and vice versa.
• Design digital texts for screen readers and keyboard navigation.
• Use alt text for all images in digital compositions.

For some further recommendations, here is a link to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is a helpful resource for making digital compositions more accessible. We recommend bookmarking it for future reference.

Wrapping Up

Remember that designing for accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean designing for just one specific type of disability; it also doesn’t mean that you should assume a deficit for people with disabilities. Rather, think of it like this: people experience the world in a multitude of different ways, and have different understandings and experiences based on this. Your design and writing should incorporate the widest possible range of these solutions, so that they are accessible to everyone. This will not only make your communication more accessible, but will make it more inclusive and help ensure that you are engaging in ethical communication practices.

Modern composition involves a lot more than typing words onto pages. We almost always use multiple modes of communication when we write, and oftentimes we will be explicitly asked to use multiple modes in our writing. Using multiple modes can also help make our compositions more accessible and usable, but we must also think carefully about usability and accessibility when incorporating sound, visuals, and other modes. Multimodal composition is about choosing the right modes for your particular rhetorical situation, learning how those modes work and how they go together, and learning the best practices for communicating in those modes. Doing so will help you develop into a more adaptive, able writer who can be successful in a wide range of communicative situations, both in your college career and in the workplace.

Listen to the Audio Chapter