Multimodal Essay Example: “Wu Zetian”

Multimodal Essays as a Class Assignment

Essays remain a common form of writing in college and across disciplines, as are memos, proposals, and reports. Being able to recognize how multimodality can strengthen your writing practice is also a helpful strategy to consider when writing an essay. Think about it: if you are discussing chromatography for organic chemistry or trends in economic growth based on geographical locations, a chart or table visualizing the data you are incorporating as evidence for your argument would be immensely pertinent to helping prove your claims. Sometimes it will help your audience to see a document or artifact that you’re discussing, such as a letter written by Alexander Hamilton, or a painting, or a screenshot of a webpage (much like WOVENText has done). What you write should address what images you’ve included, smoothly integrating content that analyzes and discusses your multimodal elements with descriptive text and outside sources. The ability to compose a coherent, logical, insightful essay is something you can develop with practice. Consider the following genre expectations when reading and drafting essays.

Analyzing a Multimodal Essay

Contributed by former Brittain Fellow Dr. Mary Grace Elliott.

Rhetorical Situation and Choices

Purpose

In Dr. Mary Grace Elliott’s Fall 2020 English 1101 class, students were asked to pitch an original idea for a new Broadway musical adaptation of a historical event, character, or sociopolitical movement. This project was the culmination of their semester, incorporating what they had learned about audience, ethos, and genre. Previous artifacts for the class included a press kit for an existing musical adaptation and a review of a film or stage musical. There was no specific length requirement for the essay; instead, students had to address 6 areas of their idea—plot, characters, staging, music, source material, benefits of the show—as well as create an original poster. Most importantly, they had to keep in mind their audience: potential producers, who might come to the table with their own ideas, biases, and varied levels of interest. The project melded together research, creative writing, visual rhetoric, and collaborative writing.

Audience

Audiences for essays can vary, depending on the purpose of the writing you’re doing. For example, if you are writing an essay that you intend to send to be published at a web-based organization, Slate or Medium for example, your audience is very broad: anyone who can access that webpage. If you are writing for TECHnique, your audience would consist of Georgia Tech’s community. If you are attending a conference in your discipline, your essay would address other experts in the field. The primary audience for Dr. Elliott’s multimodal essay assignment was a group of imagined, potential investors/producers. Thus, students had to adapt their writing from a more comfortable, academic tone to a professional one.

Rhetorical Appeals

When writing a creative essay with a research component, you will demonstrate ethos by first demonstrating passion and personal investment in your original idea, and then by incorporating reliable outside sources to bolster your own argument. Your organization of the essay’s content will produce logos, while you may include pathos by using humor or invoking sadness in your audience, depending on your topic (in this case, the plot of the students’ play). In the multimodal essay above, the students included images of already existing musicals, plays, and Chinese costumes and fashions to provide their audience with a visual concept for the atmosphere of the production. They included a summary of source material both to bolster their ethos as experts on this story as well as to give context for a part of Chinese history that may not be familiar to American audiences.

Modes & Media

The modes and media you can include when you compose a multimodal essay will depend on your platform, as well as on your purpose. If you hyperlink to sites on the internet in your essay, perhaps to a webpage where you found information, you will have incorporated electronic communication. You might want to include video clips or music if your medium affords them, incorporating the visual, oral and nonverbal modes as well as the written. Above, you can see that these students included images and color contrasts to illustrate their points in the argument they were making. Most impressive was the template they created, illustrating the potential branding of the show.

Elements of the Genre

Introduction: Make sure the topic of your essay is clear and your audience knows exactly what it is you’ll be arguing or discussing. These students have done so by including an original poster on the title page, including the title of the show. They begin the summary of their show with a strong rhetorical question (a tactic appropriate for their audience), which directs the readers attention immediately to the salient themes in the show.

Argument: As an author, you are taking a position. Making sure your position is clearly stated is crucial to the success of your essay. These students identify the position they have taken at the top of the third page, subsequently developing it through their original story, their summary of source material, and the potential social benefits of the show.

Evidence: A claim is only as strong as the evidence used to support it. You must be clear about what your evidence is, what about that evidence supports the claims you make, and why you are making them. Including visual evidence from the archives, actually showing the audience what this show will look and sound like, brings home their points in the essay.

Images or other graphics: A multimodal essay can incorporate modes that are not visual, of course, but including images and other visual media with the text you’ve written will help illustrate your arguments. Images are an integral part of the multimodal essay above.

Style

The essay above is formal, although not in the typical academic sense. It discusses themes that have a great deal of serious social justice implications through an historical lens. Those implications are clear due to the students’ choice to write clearly and firmly to establish their authority and knowledge of what they’ve learned, and the detail the images provide help support the students’ proposal. The headings throughout the document indicate exactly what each section discusses.

Design

Consider who your audience is and how you will be disseminating your essay in addition to the type of essay you’re writing. This information will guide your design choices. You may utilize a column format if you are writing for web publication, for example, or need to include section headings and subheadings. Decide where to include your images or graphs, if you have them. In the example multimodal essay, the students have created a PDF that investors/producers would be able to peruse at their leisure following a formal interview. As new musical creators would typically only have 10-15 minutes to orally make a pitch, the document is designed to provide further information for the audience. As their audience would read their proposal without them in the room, their design choices (especially the original template and consistent branding) hold the readers’ attention.

Sources

If you include information from outside sources, or media created by someone besides you, you must cite those sources. These students have cited each image as it appears as well as included a Works Cited list following the summary of their source material. As their audience was not an academic one, they did not focus as much on adhering to one style guide for citations, but rather used the most effective and transparent methods they could to lead their reader easily to their sources.

Text for this page came from Chapter 12 in WOVENText, 2021 edition.