From reading Michael-John Depalma and Kara Poe Alexander’s article, “A Bag Full of Snakes”, writing multimodal compositions sounds like a challenging process. Students faced challenges relating to audience, semiotic resources, and transfer. There were many more challenges relating to ethics, technology and rhetorical constraints. However, just like the article, I’m only going to focus on the main three. In this blog, I will explain more on the struggles of crafting multimodal compositions.
It’s difficult to conceptualize a multidimensional audience when composing multimodally. The article states that students resorted to defining their audience in broad and imprecise terms such as “public”, “humans”, “the average person”, and “people generally”. To be honest, these sound like terms I would use if I were to write my first multimodal composition. What would be an example of a multimodal audience? Hopefully, this is question I’ll never have to answer in any future classes I take.
Students also had trouble determining which aspects of their print-based genre knowledge and composing experiences might enable them to create a nuanced, accessible, and sophisticated multimodal text for a diverse audience and which aspects might stifle their ability to do so. In simpler language, they had difficulty understanding how to use the multiple semiotic resources afforded through multimodal composition to their advantage. What are semiotic resources? More importantly, if you still don’t know what a multimodal audience is, how can you use those resources? Again, I hope I’ll never have to do something like this in any of my classes.
Transfer between contexts did not always or easily occur. This means there was difficulty revising and editing multimodal texts the same way you would print-based texts. Up to this point, I thought revising and editing for all texts was the same. According to this article however, the way you revise and edit texts depends on what type of text it is. Under these circumstances, this assignment seems more fitted for Ivy-League college students.
DePalma and Alexander’s “A Bag Full of Snakes” involved recording the results of students being tasked with writing multimodal compositions. The students struggled in many areas, but the main three were audience, semiotic resources, and transfer. I think it’s challenging enough any time your professors require you to write a basic print-based essay. It’s even more dreadful to think that some professors make their students complete assignments like this regularly. Although I believe that I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me, I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be somewhat anxious if I had to complete this type of assignment for a test grade!
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