Alethea Carr

Ms. Carla Anderton

Composition and Culture

October 13, 2018

Multimodal Text Production

The making of a multimodal text was extremely different than anything I had done for an

English class before although was did not have much trouble working with the technology as I

was familiar with it before beginning the project. I chose to use iMovie because it was a good

recommended source that I had used before. The first thing I did before beginning to record the

audio portion of my multimodal text was pick a few pictures that I wanted to display for the

duration of my literacy narrative story. Once I thought I had picked pictures that were significant

and representative of my story, I added them to my iMovie file and adjusted them to fit the

length of the audio later. The next thing I did was call my mom and ask her to say a few lines to

add some variety to my audio components. Once I had all my outside components laid out, I

started to draw up an outline of every aspect that I wanted to touch on from my literacy narrative.

After I had it all mapped out, I sat down in one of the quiet rooms of the library and recorded my

audio.

There were many new aspects of learning that emerged from this assignment. Some

challenging aspects of this assignment was just starting in general. This assignment had been

lingering over my head for a while and I did not want to start because I knew I was going to have

to dive into things I had never done before. Although the overall story was the same from project

one, I changed some aspects in the way I told the story to make it sound more interesting. Even
though the literacy narrative was supposed to be personal, the overall final result of project one

ended up being more of a formal report style work. Project one had to be grammatically and

punctually correct so that limited the amount of self-expression you could incorporate without

being too informal. However, in project two I was able to branch out and tell my literacy

narrative as if I was telling it to a friend. Because of this, I was able to add little bits of

information and personality that I was not able to add into project one. I tried to cut out super

structured sentences from my project one and add more conversational aspects to keep the

project interesting. In my opinion, this project was more effective than project one. I was able to

use technology to tell readers about my literary story the same way I would tell it if someone

asked rather than try and articulate the whole story into a series of paragraphs.

Clearly, a huge advantage of using sound as composition was being able to be personal in

your writing but there are disadvantages to this to. Sound composition would not serve some

forms of writing any justice because it would be boring to compose and probably put readers to

sleep. Multimodal text is a fun way to engage readers however super formal papers are often not

personal and the sound file could be made by just anybody which would defeat the purpose of

being able to add effects and personality into the piece. Through this project, I learned a lot about

the different ways I can incorporate technology into my education besides for research or for

easy access to information. I learned new skills in citing sources like pictures because in

normally that is not necessary in writing. Despite older generations claiming that technology

corrupts the possibilities of learning, I believe that technology can have a positive effect on how

we learn and how we present information. Multimodal text is just another example of how

technology can positively influence my experience. College would be much more difficult if I
was not able to pull up all my work on my computer in the blink of an eye or use techniques like

multimodal composition to w
 Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Only Daughter." Writing About Writing (n.d.): 103.

—. "Only Daughter." Writing About Writing (Nov. 1990): 103.
rite.