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multimodal rhetoric and composition ENG/IMS 224 Fall 2013

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multimodal vs. multimedia

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Modes can be understood as ways of representing information, or the semiotic channels we use to compose a text (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). Examples of modes include words, sounds, still and moving images, animation and color. Media, on the other hand, are the tools and material resources used to produce and disseminate texts (p. 22). Examples of media include books, radio, television, computers, paint brush and canvas, and human voices (227). Lauer, Claire. Contending with Terms: Multimodal and Multimedia in the Academic and Public Spheres. Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 225239.

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[New London Group] scholars have argued that at this point in history, communication is not limited to one mode (such as text) realized through one medium (such as the page or the book (Lauer 227).

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Rather, as a result of digitization, all modes can now be realized through a single binary code, and the medium of the screen is becoming the primary site where multiple modes can be composed to make meaning in dynamic ways (Lauer 227).

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Essentially, as Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) put it, all modes can be operated by one multi- skilled person, using one interface, one mode of physical manipulation, so that he or she can ask, at every point: Should I express this with sound or music? Should I say this visually or verbally? (p. 2) (Lauer 227).

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writing as a medium writing as a technology

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multimodal rhetoric and composition

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What is rhetoric?

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Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion."

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Kenneth Burke: Burke builds on Aristotles definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion, or a study of the art of persuasion However, he starts prior to persuasion with identification, arguing all persuasion must begin with some form of identification of the rhetor with an audience

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