Specifically, Ball focuses on how she unintentionally incited students to follow the five-paragraph format for their video documentaries; this occurred when she used a video slideshow made by Bowen as an example for the class to analyze. During this analysis, Ball emphasized that the students identified the five paragraph-like structure of the example video. At this moment, she had “done it. I had encouraged the students to map formulaic writing onto their new media texts, which the majority of their documentaries enacted to a T” (27). Scoffield and Fenn were among the few who broke out of the formulaic structure. Ball attributes this to their prior experience with multimodal/multimedia composing; their previous experience helped them “embrace the unexpected” that comes with completing a project like the video documentary and to “engage in the critical and reflective revision strategies needed to understand the purposes and usefulness of new media composition” (27-8).
The authors offer points of advice for how to avoid the five-paragraph video:
- “Focusing on a single, formulaic genre for the major project halts the critical progress of students who don’t already come in with multimodal composition experience” (31).
- Completely open assignments won’t help either. There needs to be some direction for students.
- Don’t assume the students have no multimodal composition experience.
- Give students “time to compose and revise large, multigenre texts in enough depth” (32)
- “Avoiding scholarship in multimodal theory in a class on multimodality…is stupid” (32).
The authors assert that all texts are multimodal: “none of us communicates only through writing and… written text itself is multimodal in that it carries visual, spatial, and sonic properties every time students type a new letter-character on the page” (18).
Ball references six kinds of literacies (though she does not explain them): “basic, critical rhetorical, functional, ethical, and technological” (25)
Key Terms
- Modes: “modes of communication” (33); “linguistic, aural, visual, spatial, gestural, and combinations thereof” (18)
- Media: “how modes of communication are produced and distributed for public consumption” (33); media are “genre-independent” (34)
- Genres: “texts that use flexible, social conventions in response to a particular rhetorical situation” (34)
- Text: “any possible combination of modes or media used to communication to an audience and is recognized though specific genres” (34)
- Mutt genres: “mimic genres that mediate activities in other activity systems, but that the FYC…system their purposes and audiences are vague or even contradictory” (Wardle’s concept 29)