Kathi Yancey (2004): Sometimes, you know, you have a moment. [Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 – Prelude in G, arranged by Siloti for piano begins and continues throughout]. For us, this is one such moment.
Kathi Yancey (2023): Multimodality is a really, really rich topic, with lots to tell us about how writing behaves.
Kathi Yancey (2004): Writing is words on paper, composed on the page with a pen or pencil.
Crystal: “The word multimodal is a mash-up of multiple and mode. A mode is a way of communicating, such as the words we’re using to explain our ideas in this paragraph or the images we use throughout this book to illustrate various concepts. Multimodal describes how we combine multiple different ways of communicating in everyday life” (Writer/Designer p. 3)
Crystal [overlapping]: Linguistic design, visual design, audio design, gestural design, and multimodal design.
Kathi Yancey (2023): It’s more than words and visuals. Really? No, yes, obviously, it is.
Kathi Yancey (2004): By students who write words on paper, yes, but who also compose words and images and create audio files on weblogs in word processers with video editors and web editors, and in email, and on presentation software and in instant messaging, and on listservs, and on bulletin boards, and no doubt, in whatever genre will emerge in the next 10 minutes.
Crystal [overlapping]: Linguistic design, visual design, audio design, gestural design, and multimodal design.
Kathi Yancey (2023): That is composing multimodally. So it’s that, and it’s this, and it’s everything in between.
Crystal: Multimodal design is of a different order to the other five modes of meaning; it represents the patterns of interconnection among the other modes” (NLG, p. 198).
Kathi Yancey (2004): This is composition. And this is the content of composition. […] We have a moment.
Kathi Yancey (2023): It’s someplace between and among us, however you want to conceptualize the audience. And I think writing when it’s really smart engages both of us, and multimodality allows us to do that in a very important way.
Crystal: “Texts are designed using the range of historically available choices among different modes of meaning.” (NLG).
Kathi Yancey (2023): That is composing multimodally.
Crystal: This entails a concern with absences from texts, as well as presences in texts—for example, ‘Why not that?’ as well as ‘Why this?’ (NLG, p. 29)
Kathi Yancey (2023): So it’s that, and it’s this, and it’s everything in between.
Kathi Yancey (2004): This composition is located in a new vocabulary, a new set of practices, a new set of outcomes. It will focus our research in new and provocative ways…
Crystal: Instead of emulating the typical ways that multimodality has been approached in the field by isolating and examining particular modes in order to make meaning, throughout this book I will demonstrate that sound is an especially effective—and affective—mode for understanding how the senses work together ecologically in multimodal experience” (Ceraso, p. 10)
Crystal [overlapping]: Linguistic design, visual design, audio design, gestural design, and multimodal design.
Kathi Yancey (2023): To think in terms of the fuller conception of multimodality.
Crystal: “Of the modes of meaning, the multimodal is the most significant, as it relates all the other modes in quite remarkably dynamic relationships.” (NLG, p. 28)
Crystal [overlapping]: “ all meaning-making is Multimodal.” (NLG, p. 29)
Kathi Yancey (2004): We have a moment.
Crystal: “Evidence remains that composition may not quite yet be meeting the challenge of incorporating multimodal and multimedia into its understanding of itself” (Alexander and Rhodes, p. 5)
Kathi Yancey (2023): Most people in the field translate multimodality to digitality.
Crystal: “Wampum is multimodal in its meaning making (Haas).
Kathi Yancey (2023): Multimodality is completely templated and flattened.
Crystal [overlapping voices]: the technologies woven into the belt have communicative agency, as with the colors of the shells and the design patterns. (Haas)
Crystal [overlapping voices continue] “Neither is it “new media” simply to have a text that incorporates text and sound and graphics and animation and photographs or illustrations …
Crystal [overlapping voices continue]: The cultural context and community where the wampum resides is yet another source of meaning that gets encoded into the wampum. (Haas)
Crystal [overlapping voices continue]: I am trying to get at a definition that encourages us to stay alert to how and why we make these combinations of materials, not simply that we do it” (Wysocki, p. 19)
Crystal [overlapping voices continue]: Thus wampum is a hypertext of communicative modes—all of which contribute to cultural knowledge production and preservation. (Haas)
Kathi Yancey (2023): I think people translate multimodality as something that is superfluous, may be aesthetic, and utterly individual; opposed to something that is principled and design-oriented.
Kathi Yancey (2004): We have a moment.
Crystal: …”whether the use and layering of semiotic practices and resources happens on a screen or in a material space (Gonzales)
Kathi Yancey (2004): Consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be
Kathi Yancey (2023): There’s a kind of rhetorical dexterity here
Crystal: the key to multimodal communication resides in communicators’ rhetorical awareness and ability to navigate different rhetorical situations.” (Gonzales, pp. 41-2)
Crystal [overlapping]: the Multimodal is the most significant, as it relates all the other modes in quite remarkably dynamic relationships.” (NLG, p. 28)
Kathi Yancey (2004): And then create and share those different communication pieces in those different media to different audiences
Kathi Yancey (2023): That is composing multimodally. So it’s that, and it’s this, and it’s everything in between.
Crystal [overlapping voices]: Why not that? Why this? (NLG)
Crystal: It is also important that we, as scholars and researchers, explore the potentials of different representational systems in our own work” (Shipka, p. 135).
Kathi Yancey (2004): We have a moment.
Kathi Yancey (2023): I thought if I worked at it, I could become more visual. And so I started working at it.
Kathi Yancey (2023): We would see journals that look different than they do, we would see books that look different than they do
Kathi Yancey (2004): We have a moment.
Kathi Yancey (2023): It’s something that you practice day in and day out, because that’s what you do as a literate person. That’s what literacy means to me.
Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies. The Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Arola, K. L., Sheppard, J., & Ball, C. E. (2018). Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects (2nd ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Ceraso, S. (2018). Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Gonzales, L. (2018). Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric. University of Michigan Press. https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/0z708x360
Haas, A. M. (2007). Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice. Studies in American Indian Literatures, 19(4), 77–100.
The New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u
Shipka, J. (2011). Toward a Composition Made Whole. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wysocki, A. F. (2004). Writing new media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Utah State University Press. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/[u]: mdp.39015061327709
Yancey, K. B. (2004). Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key. College Composition and Communication, 56(2), 297–328.