Order 993836: Multimodal Rhetorics

Multimodal Rhetorics From Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. Kristin L. Arola, Jennifer Sheppard and Cheryl E. Ball. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2014. Using Multimodal Rhetorics- Concepts and Activities Purpose Writing is not the only way people use rhetoric- ALL communication and argument is multimodal- meaning that everything from images, video, gestures, body language, color, sound, spatial distance, and more contributes to meaning and shapes how others are persuaded by it. Being better aware of how multimodal rhetorical choices influence an audience can help you to be more critical of what others are saying to you, as well as to make use of these strategies in your own communication. These notes and activities are excerpted from Writer/Designer: Making Multimodal Projects by Kristin Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl Ball.

• Mode- a semiotic resource or means of communication

• Multimodal- the ways we combine different ways (or modes) of communicating in everyday life

• Text- the artifact that results from communicating in any mode or combination of modes (words, images, sound, etc.)

• To produce a successful text, writers must be able to consciously use different modes both alone and in combination

• Each mode plays a role individually in the overall message, but it’s their combination that creates the full feel and function of the text

• Five modes of communication: o Linguistic- the use of language (word choice, delivery of spoken text, organization of writing or

speech into phrases, paragraphs, sentences, etc., the development and coherence of individual words and ideas)

o Visual- images and other characteristics that can be seen (size, color, layout, style, etc.); very good at communicating how something looks or how someone is feeling, how to do something

o Aural- focuses on sound as a means of communicating and/or understanding information (music, sound effects, ambient noise/sound, silence, tone of voice in spoken language, volume of sound emphasis, accent)- sound signals information

o Spatial- physical arrangement (layout, organization, proximity between people and/or objects)

o Gestural- includes facial expressions, hand gestures, body language, interaction between people- provides an important way of making or understanding meaning, responses, and relationships

• Medium/Media- the specific expression of communication within a given mode (water color would be a medium in the mode of visual expression)

• Affordances- the strengths and weakness of individual modes or media in a given rhetorical situation

One way to think about the different modes of communication is as a set of tools. You may not use all of them in a single project because each mode has its own affordances and constraints (strengths and weaknesses)- just like a wrench is probably more useful for fixing a faucet than a hammer. Sometimes, though, modes can be used productively in ways they weren’t intended (like using a screwdriver to open a can of paint). While all the modes have affordances on their own, it is the combination of modes that really give them their rhetorical and multimodal strength. As a writer/designer, you have to think carefully about your rhetorical situation (your audience, purpose, and context) to choose the modes, media, and genres that will function most persuasively for your given situation.

Analyzing Design Choices One of the ways we can better understand how writers/designers communicate meaning through multimodal texts is to examine its design elements. As we look more closely at the types of choices a designer makes, we focus on six key design concepts: emphasis, contrast, color, organization, alignment, and proximity. These terms aren’t the only ones you could use to talk about choices, but they give you a start. Although many of these concepts refer to visual issues, they can easily be applied to other modes of communication. For example, emphasis, as a visual strategy focuses on characteristics like bolding or italics to call attention to important content. Similarly, in thinking about the auditory mode, emphasis could describe the how the sound of a fire alarm emphasizes the need to evacuate a building or the way that background music fades to allow viewers to hear dialogue between characters. We ask you to think about how design choices such as these are or are not effective in supporting a multimodal text’s message in a given rhetorical situation. Below we define these terms and provide a few quick examples.

Emphasis In speech or writing, emphasis means stressing a word or a group of words to give it more importance. In visual texts, it means the same thing; emphasis gives certain elements greater importance, significance, or stress than other elements in the text, which can guide your reading of the text as a whole.

Contrast Contrast is the difference between elements, where the combination of those elements makes one element stand out from another. Contrast can be determined by comparing elements in a text. Color, size, font, bolding, placement, shape, and content can all be used to create contrast. It also plays a large role in emphasis, in that the most contrasted element often appears to be the most emphasized. Finally, contrast can be used to create a hierarchy within a text that helps readers know their location within the content and to navigate through the text as a whole.

Color Color can be extremely helpful when determining emphasis in a visual text. Visual emphasis can be accorded to how bold or large, or how much black compared to the white or gray background, is used. Although color theory indicates that different cultures interpret colors differently around the world, warm colors are usually read as

more emotionally intense—think fire, sun, and summer—and are used to elicit emotional reactions in audiences. Cool colors are usually read as calming and are used to create less emphasis than warm colors in a visual composition. Analyzing a text for color means noticing not only what colors are being used, but to what effect. Do the colors create a certain mood or feeling? Do they work to emphasize a particular element? Or do they work to highlight certain elements on the page in relation to each other?

Organization Organization is the way in which elements are arranged to form a coherent unit or functioning whole. You can talk about an organization of people, which puts people into a hierarchy depending on their job title and department, or about organizing your clothes, which might involve sorting by color and type of garment. You can also talk about organizing an essay, which involves arranging your ideas so as to make the strongest argument possible. Or you can talk about organizing the multimodal elements of a Web site to support the purpose of the text. Consider the most recent redesign of your favorite social media site. Where did the designers move the direct- messaging feature? The group chats? The media upload buttons? The editing features? How long did it take you to reorient your gestural navigation to find the information you wanted? Helping users understand the organizational structure of a text is important to ensure audience engagement.

Proximity Proximity means closeness in space. In a visual text, it refers to how close elements (or groupings of elements) are placed to each other and what relationships are built as a result of that spacing. The relationships created by the spacing between elements help readers understand the text, in part because readers might already be familiar with similar designs of other texts. Proximity can apply to any kind of element in a visual text, including words and images, or to elements of an audio text, such as repeating rhythms or the verses and chorus. Analyzing proximity in a text means thinking about how elements are grouped together, where they are placed on the page or screen in relation to one another, and how placement suggests purpose. One way to figure out how elements are grouped together into like categories or relationships is to squint your eyes and count how many major groups you see. Proximity is also relevant when managing multimedia elements in an animated text such as an audio or video file. Consider how a soundtrack element and a filmic element might need to meet up in a video- editing timeline to achieve a text’s purpose. Or, think about how annoying it is when you’re watching a movie or TV show and the audio track isn’t synced properly with the video! The proximity of the multimedia elements matters a lot for audience understanding of purpose. Why Should Multimodal Composing Matter to You? Multimodal projects are fun! But they’re not JUST that. They’re useful and flexible and timely—just as writing is— while also doing double or triple the communicative work of writing because of the multiple layers of meaning that the modes of communication carry. Take, for example, the two images below. Artist Katherine Young was unhappy with the way girls’ magazines portrayed their needs and goals in a way that only emphasized fashion and friends, so she redesigned this magazine cover to emphasize girls’ needs and goals that are career, health, and community oriented. By re-using an existing design for the teen magazine genre and making smart choices for text, font, color, image and layout, Young made a multimodal feminist statement--without needing to explictly state the issue or her stance.

Figure 1.5 The original Girls’ Life cover (left) and Young’s redesign (right) In the world, in your everyday life, texts are never monomodal, never just written, but are always designed with multiple media, modes of communication, and methods of distribution in mind. Learning how to analyze and compose multimodal texts prepares you for that kind of writing—the kind you will use every day of your life. Whether you work from home, in a large corporation, a small non-profit organization, or some other professional or personal setting, you will need to write. And writing in the 21st century is always multimodal. This whole book is about the what and how of multimodal composition, but the why is the motivation for it. We draw inspiration from a group of multimodal communication scholars (called the New London Group, discussed more in Chapter 2) who explain the why this way: Multimodal composition allows us to become makers of our social futures. That sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it? But what exactly does it mean? By learning to compose multimodal texts instead of re-hashing the limited use of written essays, writer/designers can communicate in more globally aware, digitally driven, ethical, and accessible ways. The magazine cover redesign above is a great example of using multimodality to (re)make our social futures.

Research-based writing typical of college essays is a critical and important literacy, but it’s only one part of learning how to communicate persuasively in contemporary settings. Authors need to be flexible and draw on any possible way to communicate that might be effective. In that way, the fundamental goals of writing and designing are the same:

• to think critically about the kinds of communication that are needed in any given situation (determining a communication’s audience, purpose, context of use)

• to choose information sources and media assets that will help create an effective and persuasive text (making source selections based on the argument being made and the kinds of support you need to back it up)

• to work within and fulfill your audience’s needs and goals (figuring out what your audience wants and needs from your communication)

• to improve communication through the finished text (utilizing a recursive cycle of brainstorming, researching, drafting, and revising)

• to create change or encourage positive action through a text (fulfilling the purpose and promise of a communication to have a desired impact on the audience)

Infographics: One Example of Multimodal Rhetorics A brief overview of Infographics as a genre, their rhetorical purposes, and their affordances ALL communication is multimodal, meaning that everything from images, video, gestures, body language, tone of voice, color, sound, spatial distance, written words, and more contributes to meaning and shapes how others are persuaded by it. Being more aware of how multimodal rhetorical choices influence an audience can help you to be more critical of what others are saying to you and how, as well as to make strategic use of these strategies in your own communications. One interesting place to see multimodal rhetorics at work is in the increasingly common genre of infographics. As Curtis Newbold suggests, “The power of infographics comes in complex details coupled with opportunity for storytelling” and the more complex the data and storytelling, “the more likely the infographic will be able to compel us to think differently about something”. That is, the multiple modes available for use in infographics give writers/designers a set of affordances with the potential to make information more accessible and inviting to a larger audience through placing those ideas within a story. In their book Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling, authors Jason Lankow, Josh Ritchie, and Ross Crooks argue that infographics have become so popular because they: 1. are fun to look at (“appeal”) 2. help us understand information quickly and easily

(“comprehension”) 3. help us remember things (“retention”)

With these genre considerations in mind, a writer/designer creating an infographic still has to make rhetorical and multimodal choices to best fit her audience, purpose, and context. One of the cardinal rules of an infographic is to keep it concise, stripping away everything except the essentials. At the same time, every element, from font style, size, and color to the use of photographs, charts, and graphs has an impact on how an audience will make sense of information and respond to an infographic’s message. To make the most of these possibilities, infographic writers/designers have to balance ways of making their texts visually appealing and informative with the need to communicate ideas, data, and arguments clearly, concisely, and persuasively. One other important consideration comes from longtime information design advocate, Edward Tufte. He suggests that all good visual displays of information a macro (overall, big-picture perspective) and a micro (close-up detailed

perspective) reading of a given situation. That is, in infographics and other visual displays, the designer should give audiences both an understanding of the whole text/argument AND small, detailed examples to help

support it. Just as you would provide readers a preview of your argument and structure in a written essay, a strong infographic must also help to situate the audience and give then a clear understanding of what you’re arguing and how you’ll get there.

o A writer/designer creating an infographic needs to prioritize message, retention, and ease-of-reading based on the rhetorical situation.

o Infographics are one of the most effective ways to present a lot of information in an interesting, concise, and easily digestible way. It’s much faster to get the gist of something by scanning an infographic than reading several paragraphs of text.

o The more data and complex the storytelling, the more likely an infographic will be able to compel us to think differently about something, whether the infographic is telling a news story or is simply trying to provide useful information.

o Most infographics make explicit arguments about their subject, as well as subtle arguments about culture, society, government, politics, and values. With careful analysis of infographics, you’ll start to interpret events and draw conclusions about our society, the choices we make, what we value, and so forth.