Before coming to my writing class, I don’t think I had ever heard the word ‘multimodal’. The readings from week 1 were interesting to me because while I knew there were different ways to write things and get an overall message across to a reader, but I have never really thought too deeply about the different categories and why someone may choose one way to convey their message than another. I feel like most times especially in school, we are told one way to do a presentation or project, there wasn’t much room for choice/options. When there was room for choice, I often just picked one that I would like doing, I never really put in much thought as to which would get the information to the audience in the best way. In the text it talks about how important it is to think about the audience when choosing which mode to use. I agree with this, but before reading these chapters, like I said, I never put a lot of thought into it. This being said, I enjoyed learning about all the different modes a person could use.
I have always enjoyed writing. I like being able to write my thoughts down because often times for me, it’s easier than articulating them. The linguistic mode I think was always the most prominent and my go to. I like the linguistic mode because it’s easiest for me to get my thoughts across. I’m also not too creative and I feel like often times, it’s not necessary in the linguistic mode. Many of the other different modes I feel like require some creative aspect to them. For example, in spatial mode, it is necessary to be creative in order to create something that is physically appealing to the eye. I think this is also true with the visual mode. I feel like also with the linguistic mode, it is easy to write what I want to write and then make it into something creative later instead of doing the creative aspect in the beginning or all at once.
Overall, I feel like these articles challenged me to see that there are other viable options to be used instead of simply the linguistic style (even though that’s the one I prefer). I think that as this class continues, I will be challenged to use different modes which may change my preference of the linguistic mode. I feel like this will be good for me to experiment with different modes I may not be so familiar with. Another reason this is great is because hopefully it will make me more aware of the audience I am writing or creating for so I can best get across my message. I am very excited to try out all the different modes!
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